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Octavio Quintanilla

octavioquintanilla.com

In this captivating episode of The Writer and the Brain, a Words on a Wire production, host Daniel Chacón sits down with poet and artist Octavio Quintanilla at the Texas Book Festival to explore his latest poetry collection, The Book of Wounded Sparrows. This deeply personal collection delves into themes of family separation, dislocation, and the transformative power of memory and time. Octavio reflects on his journey as a poet, from his debut collection If I Go Missing to this profoundly intimate new work, revealing how his growth as an artist mirrors his evolution as a human being.

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To download the podcast version visit wordsonawire.org

Originally aired on January 12, 2025

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Daniel Chacón’s collection of stories, Unending Rooms, was the 2007 winner of the Hudson Prize. He has also been awarded the American Book Award, the Chris Isherwood Foundation Grant, and the Southwest Book Award. His first collection of stories, Chicano Chicanery was a finalist in the Patterson Fiction Prize and his novel and the shadows took him is available from Simon and Schuster. His new book is a collection of stories called Hotel Júarez: Stories, Rooms and Loops. He’s a professor of Fiction Writing, Kafka, and Latino/a literature in the Creative Writing Department at UTEP.
Will Rose is a longtime technology and marketing executive based out of NYC and Texas. He is the co-founder of Words on a Wire’s publishing imprint, eRadical Books, and now spearheads marketing strategy for the Words on a Wire podcast. He also serves as Chief Technology Officer at the EdTech startup, Student Select, and as Head of Data Science at the artificial intelligence company, Harqen AI.
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