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Poetry Event: Noel Quiñones and Adrienne Novy celebrate new releases!
Featured Book
Orange
A bold and tender portrait of family, identity, and truth in the North Bronx. Through narrative poems and innovative forms inspired by color theory and elementary school, Orange explores the ripple effects of queerness, lies, and finding yourself in a family. In this visceral new collection, however, the scope of “family” expands well beyond the nuclear unit; Noel Quiñones’s poems center relationships between friends, cousins, partners, and many other family members. Painting a vivid and fraught portrait of the North Bronx, Quiñones unflinchingly confronts the contradictions at the heart of love, divorce, gender, religion, and community, unpacking the complexities of coming out, divorced parents, and generational trauma. Orange ultimately argues that truth resembles color: something real, yet elusive, and impossible to prove.
This book will be available for purchase at the event.
About This Event
Enjoy an evening of poetry with two local poets! Join Noel Quiñones to celebrate their debut poetry collection, Orange, and Adrienne Novy to celebrate her latest book, good luck in the real world.
Free RSVP is requested (scroll to the end)
Preorder your books to pick up at the event!
Featured Author
Noel Quiñones
Noel Quiñones is an Emmy and O. Henry award-winning Nuyorican writer, educator, and speaker from the Bronx. Their work has been published in Poetry, Boston Review, Poem-a-Day, and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT anthology, as well as the Michigan Quarterly Review, for which they won the 2025 Jesmyn Ward Fiction Prize. Their short story "This Time and the Next" will be included in The Best Short Stories 2026: The O. Henry Prize Winners. They have also received fellowships from CantoMundo, Lambda Literary, the Poetry Foundation, Tin House, and Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of the University of Mississippi's MFA program and founder of Project X, a Bronx-based spoken word poetry organization, Noel is currently a poet in residence with the Chicago Poetry Center.
In Conversation With
Adrienne Novy
Adrienne Novy is an artist from the suburbs of Chicago (Potawatomi Land). A 2020 graduate from Hamline University’s Creative Writing program, Adrienne’s work has been nominated for Bettering American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net. She is the author of three poetry collections: Crowd Surfing With God (Half Mystic Press, 2018/2023), Erev Gildene: The Pop-Rock Survival Guide for the Modern Jewish Millennial (Game Over Books, 2022), and good luck in the real world (Button Poetry, 2026). Adrienne lives on social media at @adriennenovy.
About the Venue
City Lit Books
Located in the heart of Logan Square, City Lit specializes in contemporary fiction and non-fiction, with a richly curated collection of children's literature, speculative fiction, poetry, and more. Our store is a literary hub for the community, hosting many book clubs, poetry readings, and author events.
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