Octavio Quintanilla is the 2025 Texas Poet Laureate and the author of the poetry collections, If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014), The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, winner of the 2024 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets (University of Arizona Press, 2025).

He is the founder and director of the literature & arts festival, VersoFrontera, publisher of Alabrava Press, and former Poet Laureate of San Antonio, Texas. His Frontextos (visual poems) have been published and exhibited widely, including in the Mexican Cultural Institute in San Antonio, Texas, El Paso Museum of Art, Southwest School of Art, Presa House Gallery, Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, and in the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center / Black Box Theater in Austin, Texas. His poetry and Frontextos can be found in public spaces such as at the San Antonio Labor Plaza and at Poet’s Pointe. Quintanilla is also the recipient of the Nebrija Creadores Scholarship which allowed him a month-long residency at the Instituto Franklin at Alcalá University in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. He holds a doctorate from the University of North Texas and teaches Literature and Creative Writing in the M.A./M.F.A. program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. He was recently inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.

The Visiting Writers Reading Series is sponsored by the Department of English, the Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty, the Lawrence Parke Murphy and Robert Goldstein Trust, and by generous donations from the extended Whitman community.