Noel Quiñones is an Emmy award winning writer, speaker, educator, community organizer, and cultural worker who believes in the power of storytelling to build community. Through their keynotes “What We Owe Each Other” and “Working With Instead of For”, Noel invites connection by sharing their own story, acknowledging mistakes, centering vulnerability, and supporting others in sharing theirs. Noel has shared their story at Lincoln Center, Harvard University, the Ford Foundation, BAM, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Stanford University, and the Honolulu Museum of Art. Their work has been published in POETRY, the 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. In addition, they have been featured on Huffington Post, Vibe, Tidal Music, Latina Magazine, Medium, Univision, Remezcla, Mitú & elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Mississippi M.F.A. program and founder of Project X, a Bronx-based spoken word organization, Noel is currently a poet in residence with the Chicago Poetry Center. Their debut poetry collection, Orange, will be published with CavanKerry Press this coming May, 2026.