In Conversation: Katherine D. Oldmixon Garza & Octavio Quintanilla

We are excited to bring together two poets and artists from Texas, Katherine D. Oldmixon Garza and Octavio Quintanilla. Octavio’s Book of Wounded Sparrows and Katherine’s Life Afterlife / A Book of the Hours have shared themes of grief, loss, and mourning. Katherine writes about the two books as singing together, or rather, “By sing, I might mean keen, not as a wild wailing but sometimes as a wild ceremony, sometimes as a ceremony in the wild.” We can then add an additional dimension: their multiple languages and modalities used to produce their work. Octavio adds, “I am interested to see how our work converges and diverges in terms of how we write grief, joy, closure.”

Katherine Durham Oldmixon Garza

Katherine Durham Oldmixon Garza,Ph.D., M.F.A., is the author of Life Afterlife / A Book of the Hours (3: A Taos Press, 2024) and the chapbook Water Signs (Finishing Lines Press, 2009). She directs the Poetry at Round Top Festival held annually in Round Top, Texas. Now professor emerita at Huston-Tillotson University where she taught literature and creative writing and chaired the English department, Katherine is a full-time writer, ecological gardener, and visual artist at home in Austin, TX.

Octavio Quintanilla

Octavio Quintanilla is the 2025 Texas Poet Laureate and the author of the poetry collections, If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014) and The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award, and a 2026 Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Most recently, he published Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, winner of the 2024 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets and winner of the Burdine C. Johnson Award for Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letter (University of Arizona Press, 2025).

Octavio 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. He teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Our Lady of the Lake University and was recently inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. IG: @writeroctavioquintanilla