We Call Upon the Author to Explain—Noel Quiñones

For this installment of We Call Upon the Author to Explain we had the tremendous honor of getting to speak to award winning writer, educator, speaker, and activist Noel Quiñones about their brilliant collection Orange, out May 5th with CavanKerry Press. This collection explores the importance of time and place and the impact both have on who we are and how we grow. Orange is a wonderfully inventive and interactive collection that manages to engage with serious subjects while also delighting the senses. It’s a beautiful collection that is sure to make you both think and smile.

Ada Wofford: On the color wheel, orange is opposite blue, making blue the complimentary color of orange. Blue, as in “the blues,” “feeling blue,” etc. Was this a conscious connection you made when choosing the title Orange for this collection? If not, what do you think about this connection and is this a fair reading of the title?

Noel Quiñones: Funnily enough, orange has been my favorite color since childhood. I’ve asked my parents and none of us can remember when I first fell in love with it but that once I did, I was obsessed. My friends called me “orange boy” in middle school because I would show up in an orange winter coat, hat, gloves, and backpack over my Catholic school uniform. I wrote a poem in college about how misunderstood I felt for my love of orange, but little did I know how right I was.

There was a very early version of this collection that was split into six sections, one for each of the primary and secondary colors: red, blue, yellow, orange, green, and violet. I tried to fit poems into my very basic understandings of these colors, a.k.a. blue meant sadness, red meant anger, yellow meant joy, etc. I was continually frustrated by this constraint and so I started researching color history and color theory, the art and science of how colors affect humans. I was absolutely blown away as I learned that colors are so much more nuanced and dynamic than I ever could have conceived. Blue, while traditionally the color of sadness, became associated with the divine when used in the twelfth century to depict the Virgin Mary; today it is at the height of its popularity, as a survey of hundreds of countries found that blue is people’s favorite color by a considerable margin. Yellow, while of course associated with value, beauty, and joy, has at the same time meant contamination, rebellion, and perversion; most famously the 1890s were known as the “Yellow Nineties” as artists pushed back against the repression of Victorian values.

Orange, it turns out, has always been hard to pin down. In reading Joann Eckstut and Arielle Eckstut’s The Secret Language of Color, I was struck by this quote: “For millennia, orange was a color without an identity. In many languages, it’s one of the very last, if not the last, color named in the rainbow.” Cultural historian Kassia St. Clair, in her book The Secret Lives of Color, talks about a similar difficulty with orange. Since it wasn’t considered its own distinct color until relatively recently, it is “forever in danger of sliding into another color: red and yellow on either side, brown below.” Without knowing it, I had chosen a color as a toddler that exemplified complexity, one that invited frustration, confusion, awe, and engagement. This made it a perfect and yet completely unplanned title.

AW: In the poem, “How to Color Mami” you use the phrase, “the sky in your world.” I was very struck by this phrase and its use of the word “your.” In a literal sense we all share the same sky and the same world, but of course it often doesn’t feel like that when faced with the reality of the disparity that exists among individuals. Can you speak a bit about why you chose this phrasing and what it means to you?

NQ: I am so happy you felt pulled to this line, it is one of my favorite lines in the whole book! I want to cite the whole line though for context: “Won’t you draw the color of the sky in your world?” First, I love it because of how random its source is, haha. The line comes from an interview with the developer of my favorite video game of all time, Psychonauts, where you play as psychic cadet being trained on how to enter someone else’s mind and help them work through their mental struggles, whether it be depression, bipolar disorder, etc. Second, there is a color theory fact that I love: no two people on the entire planet see the exact same shade of any color. This disparity in individual experience, as you name, was central to my collection as I navigated three different peoples experience of a divorce: my mother, my father, and myself.

I chose this phrasing, put the phrase in my mother’s voice, and made this poem the first in the book because I wanted to invite the reader to consider that not only are there many different skies, but so often we don’t even get asked the question. We presume we are sharing the same experience or, when faced with a diversity of perspective, run away from the weight of holding multiple truths at once. As the first poem, I wanted readers to hopefully hold this question as they journeyed through the collection.

AW: “How to Spit Game on Mosholu Parkway” struck me as a time capsule of the early 2000s. Later in the collection you fittingly title another reference-laden poem, “The Time Capsule.” I grew up during this time too and was charmed by the various references in these two poems (the HitClips one especially made me smile), but for younger readers who did not experience that decade, what do you hope they take away from these poems?

NQ: HitClips forever! My cousin actually still has hers; we found them when unpacking her boxes after a move. Building on that, I hope the take away is that we must cherish our knickknacks. I don’t expect younger readers to know or research all of my references, but I do hope my love for this decade, for these random trends, items, and slang, endears them to do the same.

As a fellow millennial, you understand that we straddled two worlds, the analog and the digital. As we continue to move online, I find myself more and more attached to the physical. I have a VHS and DVD collection, I’ve been keeping every movie ticket I ever got since 2009, and I have binders of Yu-Gi-Oh cards. I believe there is something important about keeping things, for nostalgic reasons of course, but also for historical documentation. And so, I hope younger readers create their own time capsules like I did.

AW: Can you speak about the importance of “place” in this collection and how you use it? (I’m referring to your use of various references to places such as Jerome Ave, the Bronx, “Dogshit Park,” even Burger King; but feel free to take it further than this if you wish to speak about an inner space, a metaphorical space, etc.)

NQ: This feels so connected to the previous question. Growing up, all I heard about the Bronx was how terrible, ghetto, dirty, disgusting, dangerous, and ignored it was. On top of that, when people said these things, they directed them toward the South Bronx. I grew up in the North Bronx, in a tight knit community, where there was of course danger but also connection.

This collection is a time capsule in and of itself, for not just a time period but a place that was never talked about. The North Bronx is worthy of stories, historical documentation, and celebration. I want more pieces of art about the Bronx, about Oakland, about the Southside of Chicago, about all the places in our country so stereotyped, misunderstood, and silenced that we don’t even consider them “places”. What few stories we have about the Bronx are negative, and so I hope that Orange can be a story that contradicts, that combats, and makes people question what they believe about my hometown.

AW: Ms. Frizzle is another distinctly Millennial reference, why did you choose her to be a character in this collection?

NQ: Orange is deeply influenced by my mother’s job as an elementary school teacher of 29 years in the South Bronx. I like to say that my mother was a teacher both at work and at home. She truly enjoyed teaching and saw learning as a necessary part of life, whether it was reading books, visiting museums, or attending cultural events. This made it particularly hard to watch her feelings toward teaching sour over time, not because of teaching itself, but because of the New York Department of Education’s ever shifting and last-minute mandates and society’s lack of investment in teachers. When I made the decision to become a teacher, she cautioned me against it. But her influence had already been cemented; I wanted to do what she did. I’ve proudly taught high school for over 7 years.

As I mentioned before, I grew up hearing the most terrible things about the Bronx. But it went beyond that because I was being “taught” how to view the place I lived at the same time I loved where I grew up. I knew that I wanted to find a way to write poems about these dangerous perceptions, that I needed a persona to hold these contradicting themes. But who?

The answer came when I saw a post from @millennialmisery on Instagram (to anyone reading this, please follow if you grew up in the 90s, it is so funny and nostalgic!). They had posted a GIF from an episode of The Magic School Bus, where Ms. Frizzle takes her students through the life cycle of salmon. Not only is the school bus transformed into a salmon, but the students are turned into salmon fish eggs and then fertilized. The caption of the GIF read, “Remember when the Magic School Bus kids got jizzed on by salmon?” The comments were filled with hysterical comments about how Ms. Frizzle would get put in jail for consistently putting her students in danger. I laughed and laughed and laughed and then had a lightbulb moment.

What if we not only named Ms. Frizzle’s negligence, but also humanized her by highlighting the challenges of teaching? By using this larger-than-life character, I could showcase the nuances of being a teacher as well as the very act of teaching. I ended up writing a series of poems in the voice of Ms. Frizzle, trying my best to show her reservations, her well-intentions, her biases, her adventurousness, and her deviousness. In her I had found a way to comment on the larger themes of my collection without relying on my loved ones, offering a distance that I hope invoked the lofty power and responsibility teachers had.

AW:  This might somewhat relate to the last question, but as an educator what value do you think poetry has as an educational tool—both for teachers using poetry in the classroom as well as for readers engaging with poetry outside of the classroom on their own terms?

NQ: I am currently a poet in residence with the Chicago Poetry Center (CPC), where I get to teach poetry in Chicago public schools across the city. One of my favorite schools I teach at, a largely first-generation immigrant middle school, has continued to prove to me that poetry has incredible value as an educational tool. I have many students who have either recently learned English or are trying to improve their ability in it. Poetry allows them the opportunity to see language as a playground, not a strict set of rules that overwhelms them. CPC encourages us to tell students that we don’t care about your spelling or grammar during our sessions; we care about you expressing yourself to the best of your ability. This invitation, to not just wordplay but also telling a story on your own terms, has produced poems that remind me every week of the power of this art form. I could describe some here, but I’d rather encourage people to read some of the student poems at our website; we publish 2-3 poems a week from all of our classrooms across the city.

As for people engaging with poetry outside of the classroom, I am so encouraged by the way spoken word poetry has expanded and continued poetry’s important cultural legacy. While all creative writing allows for people to feel connected to another’s story, I believe there is a unique openness and care in poetry, with its invitation to break conventions, to say the thing beneath the thing, to elicit emotion at the smallest levels of language that teach us all how to “feel.”

AW: This collection is wonderfully engaging, from scanning a QR code to having to hold one poem up to a mirror in order to read it, why did you decide that this approach was essential to what you were aiming to express/accomplish with this collection?

NQ: As a high school student, I was introduced to poetry through spoken word, where interaction was a mandatory part of it. We used our voice and body language to bring the audience more intimately into the poem. I wanted to do the same thing on the page, to push against the passiveness of the reading experience, to invite the reader to collaborate in meaning making, and perhaps gain something deeper from having to engage.

At the same time, this collection is about understanding my parent’s decisions through and after their divorce, accepting my queer identity, and learning accountability as an AMAB person. These were all, and still are, struggles I am navigating, and so I created these poetic forms that require some kind of effort, in the hopes that the effort the reader puts in highlights my efforts as a person navigating these things.

AW: Lastly, is there anything else you’d like readers to know about this collection or upcoming projects, talks, workshops, etc.?

NQ: I gotta say, I love how all of your questions are allowing me to give intertwined answers! And so, building on the previous question on engagement, I am actually working closely with my friend, fellow teacher, and paper engineer, Jean Kim, to create a 3D chapbook of selected poems from Orange that push the interactivity of my work to their fullest potential. This chapbook will have a limited run but will be available at my in-person events. I can’t wait to share it!

In terms of other projects, the experience of creating Orange really put me on a path toward interactivity across multiple artistic mediums. In the time since I finished Orange, I’ve written two award winning short stories, gained a video game writing certification, and finished Justice for my Sister’s BIPOC Sci-Fi Screenwriting Lab, where I wrote my first TV show pilot. To keep up with all that, people can sign up for my Email Newsletter here.

Orange is available through CavanKerry Press

Noel Quiñones is an Emmy and O. Henry award-winning Nuyorican writer from the Bronx. Their work has been published in Poetry, Boston Review, Poem-a-day, and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT anthology, as well as the Michigan Quarterly Review, for which they won the 2025 Jesmyn Ward Fiction Prize. Their short story, “This Time and the Next” will be included in The Best Short Stories 2026: The O. Henry Prize Winners. They have also received fellowships from Periplus, CantoMundo, Lambda Literary, the Poetry Foundation, the Watering Hole, and the Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of the University of Mississippi’s MFA program and founder of Project X, a Bronx-based spoken word poetry organization, Noel is currently a poet in residence with the Chicago Poetry Center. You can follow Noel at www.noelpquinones.com.

Ada Wofford (they/them) holds MAs in both English and Library Studies. In addition to working at a rare book shop, they are an associate poetry editor at Sundress Publications, the editor of We Call Upon the Author to Explain, and the non-fiction editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection. Their writing has appeared in The Blue Nib, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Autostraddle, Capable Magazine, Sundress Reads, and more. Their chapbook, I Remember Learning How to Dive, was published in 2020, part of which earned them a Pushcart Prize nomination.