Katherine D. Oldmixon Garza and Octavio Quintanilla’s Conversation
We are excited to bring together two poets and artists from Texas, Katherine D. Oldmixon Garza and Octavio Quintanilla, introduced by friend Marcela Sulak. 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 wrote 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 then added an additional dimension: their multiple languages and modalities used to produce their work. Octavio added, “I am interested to see how our work converges and diverges in terms of how we write grief, joy, closure.”