The University of Arizona Press
Date: Saturday, April 11, 2026
Time: 2:30-3:30 p.m., CDT
Where: Salazar Gallery, Central Library, UTSA Southwest Campus, 300 Augusta St., San Antonio, TX
Octavio Quintanilla will talk about his recent collection, Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, winner of the 2024 Ambroggio Prize, and The Book of Wounded Sparrows, at the San Antonio Book Festival on the panel titled “Exploring Big Questions through Poetry.” Quintanilla served as the 2018–2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, Texas. He teaches literature and creative writing in the MA/MFA program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. He will be talking with Natalia Treviño, author of When You Were Human. Treviño also co-translated Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours with Quintanilla.
Book signing will begin after the event at 3:45 p.m. in the Festival Marketplace.
About the book:
In Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, Octavio Quintanilla takes us on a profound journey to witness what it means to erase those boundaries devised by genre and politics intent on stifling memory, imagination, and creativity.
Presented in Spanish with English translations, this poetry collection comprises lyric and concrete poems—or frontextos—that explore intimacy and different shades of violence as a means to reconcile the speaker’s sense of belonging in the world.
