Art
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, TX.
His Frontextos (visual poems) have been published and exhibited widely, including in the Mexican Cultural Institute in San Antonio, El Paso Museum of Art, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley as part of their “Distinguished Artist Series,” 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, TX. His poetry and Frontextos can be found in public spaces such as at the San Antonio Labor Plaza and at Poet’s Pointe.
Octavio 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 Ph.D. from the University of North Texas and teaches at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. He was recently inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.
Follow him on Instgram at @writeroctavioquintanilla and on Twitter at @OctQuintanilla.
Fiction
Andrew Porter is the author of four books, including the story collections The Disappeared (Knopf) and The Theory of Light and Matter (Vintage) and the novels In Between Days (Knopf) and The Imagined Life (Knopf, 2025). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received a Pushcart Prize, a James Michener/Copernicus Fellowship, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, One Story, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, and on Public Radio’s Selected Shorts. Currently, he teaches fiction writing and directs the creative writing program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.
Creative Nonfiction
Lily Hoàng is the author of nine books, including most recently A Knock at the Door (Texas Review Press’s Innovative Prose Series), Underneath (winner of the Red Hen Press Fiction Award), A Bestiary (PEN/USA Non-Fiction Award finalist), and Changing (recipient of a PEN/Open Books Award). With Vi Khi Nao, she wrote Timber & Lụa (Red Hen Press), a collaborative collection in three languages: Vietlish, English, and Vietnamese. Currently a Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, she has taught writing workshops on five continents.
Poetry
Cyrus Cassells, the 2021 Texas Poet Laureate, is the author of eleven books of poetry, including The World That the Shooter Left Us (Four Way Books: 2022), Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? (Four Way: 2024); Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems, 1982-2022 (TCU Press: 2025), and Lorca to the Umpteenth Power (3: A Taos Press: 2026), a prose and poetry memoir rooted in Federico García Lorca’s Granada, featuring art by 2025 Texas Poet Laureate Octavio Quintanilla.
Cassells is the translator from Catalan of Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas (Stephen F. Austin State University Press: 2019); and To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu (Stephen F. Austin: 2023). Both volumes garnered the Texas Institute of Letters’ biennial Souerette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book. Cassells’s honors include the 2025 Jackson Poetry Prize given by Poets & Writers, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, an NAACP Image Award nomination, two NEA grants, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. He is a Regents’ and University Distinguished Professor of English at Texas State University.