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This week, Lone Star Literary Life wraps up our National Poetry Month coverage <\/span>with a profile of San Antonio poet and professor <\/span>Octavio Quintanilla.<\/span> He will serve as San Antonio\u2019s fourth poet laureate, for a two-year term from 2018 to 2020.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first male to hold the position, Quintanilla is tasked with generating public interest in and preserving the art of poetry, while celebrating the culture and history of San Antonio. He talks with us about his new assignment, poetry, and the Alamo City.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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LONE STAR LIT: Where did you grow up, Octavio, and what were your formative years like?<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Quintanilla: <\/b>I was born in Harlingen, Texas, but lived in Mexico till I was nine years old. I grew up in two countries and with two languages. When I came to the U.S. to live with my grandmother, everything I was stayed behind in Mexico, even my parents. So, there was that element of emotional rupture, which in many ways could describe my formative years living in the Rio Grande Valley.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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How you were raised, and how do you think your writing was influenced by where you grew up?<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Growing up in Mexico and in the Rio Grande Valley definitely influenced my writing, specially the work in my debut collection, If I Go Missing<\/span><\/a> Many of the poems have the people and the landscape of these places as their core. As far as how I was raised, my parents, and my grandmother, were pretty open-minded and caring. So, I always felt supported and loved. Overall, I was shy as kid. Maybe this is why I loved to read. I read tons of revistas<\/span>, Mexican graphic novels. When I would visit my parents in Mexico during the school breaks, my mother would have stacks of them for me to read. Reading so much as a kid helped me develop a sense of narrative, helped me with my sense of structure in writing prose and writing poetry.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Have you always written? How did you come to poetry?<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

I think I have always written. Started with stories in fourth and fifth grade. Then in middle school and high school I started liking poetry and started writing it. I don\u2019t remember what exactly got me into writing poetry. But I read a lot and I just liked words. Liked how they looked on the page. The combinations. How I could take a few words and create a variation of meanings with them. Evoke different things with the same words. Create different images. How I could check out a book from the library, carry it around, not even read it, and still feel the power I had just by the act of carrying a book. A thing full of words. I think that\u2019s how it started. My friends, too, encouraged me to write by asking me to write letters for their crushes. And my teachers. They saw it in me. This sort of encouragement kept pushing me towards the written word. They probably don\u2019t remember me, but [here\u2019s a] shout out to Mr. Warren, Mrs. Warren, Mrs. Barnes, and Mrs. Subram at Weslaco High School.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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What was your first big break as a poet?<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Becoming the 2018\u201320 Poet Laureate of San Antonio! Actually, I think my first big break was getting my first poem published back like in 2003 in a journal called Slant.<\/span> It just felt amazing to know that someone I didn\u2019t know, someone who was probably of a different race, class, and gender read my poem and thought it was good enough to publish.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Tell us about your collection of poems.<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

If I Go Missing<\/span><\/em> was published in 2014 by Slough Press. I wrote many of the poems while working on a PhD at the University of North Texas. Overall, it took me about seven years to write. The poems vary in terms of theme and structure, but collectively they evoke a strong sense of place\u2014the Mexico\/Texas borderlands.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n