Noel Quiñones

Noel Quiñones is a Nuyorican (Puerto Rican born and raised in New York City) writer, speaker, educator, community organizer, and cultural worker from the Bronx currently living in Chicago. He travels the country speaking on the power of storytelling to build community and encourages audiences to embrace human complexity, challenge societal binaries, and foster connection.

As a writer and performer, Quiñones won an Emmy award for their work in PRParadeNYC's "Legacy of Puerto Rican Poetry" documentary and was nominated for another Emmy for their role in "Takeover," a documentary on the Young Lords occupation of Lincoln Hospital in 1970 and their fight for accessible and quality healthcare for Bronx residents. His short story, “This Time and the Next,” won Michigan Quarterly Review’s 2025 Jesmyn Ward Fiction Prize and was included in The Best Short Stories 2026: The O. Henry Prize Winners Anthology. Their poem “Beyond Orange” won Vocal / Moleskin’s 2021 True Colors Poem contest and their other writing has been published in POETRY, the Boston Review, Poem-a-Day, Pleaides, Prairie Schooner, Black Warrior Review, the Offing, and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT anthology.

Quiñones has received fellowships from the Periplus, Watering Hole, CantoMundo, Lambda Literary, Tin House, Poets House, the Poetry Foundation, Writers in Paradise and Bread Loaf as well as residencies with Vermont Studio Center and SAFTA (Sundress Academy for the Arts). They were also named a finalist for the Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer Fellowship and the Palette Poetry Emerging Poet Prize. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Mississippi, where they were a John and Renée Grisham Fellow, winning their Bondurant Poetry Prize and D.C. Berry Prize.

As a speaker, Quiñones is represented by the Campuspeak agency, having spoken at Lincoln Center, Harvard University, the Ford Foundation, King’s College London, BAM, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Ocean View High School in South Africa, Stanford University, and the Honolulu Museum of Art. They have worked with over 100 colleges, universities, and K-12 schools across the globe as well as various cultural art spaces, non-profit organizations, and conferences. They were the Keynote Speaker at the first NYC Latinx Youth Conference, 2017, as well as a featured speaker at the Achieving the Dream Conference, 2023, and UnidosUS Annual Conference, 2018. Noel was commissioned by the 9/11 Memorial & Museum that same year to compose a poem honoring those who passed when the Towers fell, and most recently by UnidosUS to create new work uplifting the Latinx community during COVID. Their talks and performances have been showcased on Huffington Post, Vibe, Latina Magazine, Medium, TIDAL Music, Remezcla, Mitú & elsewhere.

As an educator and community organizer, Quiñones carries over a decade of experience facilitating workshops & open dialogues, creating & implementing curriculum, and engaging in consultations with not just schools but also prisons, senior centers, and juvenile detention centers. They have worked as a creative writing teaching artist across all age groups, an English Literature teacher and professor, a Restorative Justice facilitator, a Youth Development Coordinator, and served as an Associate Director of Service Learning & Civic Engagement for a K-12 school. In all of this work, Quiñones centers teaching, discussing, and grappling with how we communicate through both written and verbal language.

As an Associate Director of Service Learning & Civic Engagement specifically, Quiñones worked with hundreds of young people on how to combat the savior complex model in civic engagement and how to build sustainable and impactful service learning projects grounded in accountability and collectivism. Inspired by a student who asked them what their service learning project would be if they made one, Quiñones founded Project X in October, 2016. For three years, Quiñones directed this Bronx based spoken word organization, providing writing workshops, performances, professional development, funding, and volunteer opportunities to Bronx based artists and community members. During this time, Project X created the Bronx’s first ever national slam team to represent the borough and curated YERRRRR! Issa Festival: A Bronx Arts Celebration, a free event that was attended by over 300 people and featured arts & craft workshops, poetry performances, and community and food vendors. For their community work, Quiñones was named one of New York State's 40 Under 40 Rising Latino Stars by the Hispanic Coalition of New York in 2017 and a 2018 Intercultural Leadership Institute Fellow; traveling the country to connect with fellow artists, culture bearers, and arts professionals of color to network and gain essential tools to uplift our respective communities.

While Quiñones is from the Bronx, New York City, they have lived and taught in Pennsylvania, Mississippi, California, Illinois, Puerto Rico, South Africa, and England, working full time at four different high schools and part time at two colleges. It is their belief that to truly connect with students, you must understand where they are coming from and where they are going, meet them where they are across different states, regions, socio-economic levels, dialects, and school types, and practice what you preach.

Currently, Quiñones teaches writing at Odessa College, works as the Spoken Word Consultant for YoungArts, and is a poet in residence with the Chicago Poetry Center. While their debut poetry collection, "Orange," comes out in May 2026, they are hard at work on a novel, short story collection, and a Spoken Word History & Culture curriculum.