Poetry, Place and Purpose

UNT alumnus Octavio Quintanilla is selected as the 2025 Texas Poet Laureate

Octavio Quintanilla (’10 Ph.D.) has a way with words. And through poetry, he uses them to explore the connections and complexities between past and present, identity and culture, individuality and community.   

His work has been the subject of critical analysis, garnered widespread acclaim and, recently, earned him the title of Texas Poet Laureate for 2025, one of the state’s highest honors for excellence in the arts.

But nearly 20 years ago, Quintanilla was at a different turning point in his career. Looking for a change, he quit his job as a high school teacher and decided to go back to school. With two degrees already under his belt from the University of Texas Pan-American, he opted to pursue his doctorate in literature and creative writing at North Texas.

Quintanilla arrived at UNT and says he finally found the space to experiment and write from his own experiences — ones rooted in the geography and culture of the Rio Grande Valley.

“I had great mentors who took poetry seriously, not just as craft but as a way of being,” Quintanilla says. “To see them live poetry in that way was pretty powerful. It meant maybe one day I could also live in such a way.”

Quintanilla’s time at UNT proved fruitful, as he says he and his peers flourished creatively together.

“Also, it was at UNT where I first found a community of fellow writers who helped me be more attentive to the world. And to the written word,” Quintanilla says. “Though we probably never said it, we all had a sense that poetry was a space where transformation happened. And it did.”

After graduating with his doctorate, he served as a lecturer at Texas A&M University-Kingsville for two years. Quintanilla currently works as an assistant professor at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate level courses in poetry, rhetoric and literary forms, among others.

During his time in San Antonio, Quintanilla’s words have clearly struck a chord a with readers. In recognition for his sprawling work, he was named the Poet Laureate of San Antonio from 2018-2020.

“Serving as the 2025 Texas Poet Laureate is an honor for me, and I come into this role with a great sense of responsibility,” Quintanilla says. “I want to build a bridge between our cultures and histories, and one way to do this is to make poetry more accessible and relevant. Now more than ever we need to show that poetry belongs to everyone, and that it has the power to reflect both personal truths and collective struggles.”

Quintanilla’s fervent work, including The Book of Wounded Sparrows, explores various themes of dislocation — familial, geographic and emotional — and questions of language and memory, how words shape our experiences and how they shape what we remember. His most recent work, Las Horas Imposibles/The Impossible Hours, a bilingual text, explores intimacy and different forms of violence.

Quintanilla says he hopes his poetry and writings connect deeply with readers in Texas and beyond.

“I hope they recognize Texas in my poems. It’s there. The landscape, the people, the languages. Our way of being,” Quintanilla says. “Texas is at the heart of my work, and I hope it resonates with readers because it speaks to the layered, often unspoken experiences of living at the intersections of borders, languages and identities.”

Quintanilla’s work is heavily inspired by his life experiences, regional and cultural subjects and, perhaps most importantly, his passions — which he hopes other writers embrace.

“Your obsessions will give you plenty to write about,” he says. “Don’t dismiss them.”