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. Noel 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, Noel 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. Noel’s short story “This Time and the Next” won Michigan Quarterly Review’s 2025 Jesmyn Ward Fiction Prize and will be 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. Noel 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, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, 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 M.F.A. 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 Noel 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, Noel 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 Noel centers teaching, discussing, and grappling with how we communicate through both written and verbal language.