Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from a longer article, which is published online at www.swarthmorephoenix.com.
Noel Quiñones ’15 is a Nuyorican poet, educator, and performer. Their work has been featured in POETRY, the Boston Review, Poem-a-Day, and Michigan Quarterly Review. Noel received an Emmy Award for their contribution to El legado de la Poesía Puertorriqueña (Legacy of Puerto Rican Poetry), and the 2025 Jesmyn Ward Fiction Prize for work published in Michigan Quarterly Review. On April 23, they returned to Swarthmore to lead a creative writing workshop in collaboration with OASiS (Our Arts Spoken in Soul; Swarthmore’s slam poetry and creative writing club) and perform their poetry. While they were on campus, they sat down with The Phoenix for an interview. An edited transcript is as follows:
Zephyr Weinreich: Your work often uses the fluidity of language to explore the nuances and tensions that are at play within your cultural identity: you interweave lines of English and Spanish, phonetically deconstruct familiar phrases, and craft new words of your own. With that in mind, I’d love to hear more about your choice to describe yourself as “Nuyorican.” How does that term in particular resonate with your sense of your heritage?
Noel Quiñones: It was actually very recently that I started identifying as Nuyorican. There’s a lot of terminology and language – Hispanic, Spanish, Afro-Latino, Boricuan – all of these different understandings of being Puerto Rican and what that means geographically and linguistically. It’s been a lot of me trying to find the right words. As a poet, I have a really strong belief in that – in trying to figure out the right words. I’m acutely aware of the fact that words have consequences. I think it took me a long time to identify as Nuyorican just because I didn’t learn about it. Even though I grew up in New York City, I didn’t learn about the Nuyorican poetry movement of the 1960s and 1970s, because the poetry I was taught growing up was all written by old, dead, white men. Those old white men wrote great poems, but there was no expansion. It wasn’t until high school that I saw someone who looked like me reading poems.
ZW: So “Nuyorican” wasn’t a word you heard at home?
NQ: Actually, for my parents’ generation, the word Nuyorican was a derogatory term. It was used to say, “Hey, you’re not actually Puerto Rican. You left, and you don’t understand where we’re from.” And at the same time, you had other New Yorkers of different backgrounds – white people, Asian people, Black people – who would use it to say, “You’re not a real American.” What finally made me realize that this word was right for me was actually moving to Puerto Rico. For my whole childhood, my understanding of Puerto Rico had always been shaped by the retelling of my family’s shared memories, and the way they saw the island. I wanted to make my own understanding. And having done so, I realized that what I am is Nuyorican. Living on the island is fundamentally different from the diasporic experience. Calling myself something other than Nuyorican came to feel like a disservice to my very unique upbringing. So these days, I’m very proud to be Nuyorican. I believe in that word because it’s a testament to the fact that these binary identity categories we use are not as static as we think they are. I always carry this quote with me, which is from Miguel Algarín, the founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. He says that the Nuyorican poet needs to create newness. The Nuyorican poet needs a new language, new words that have never been used before. That’s incredibly exciting to me. We [Nuyoricans] are from this multifaceted background. We’re in limbo, in between all these different spaces, and we can create something new from that in our creative work.
ZW: Speaking of creative work in diverse spaces – you were an OASiS leader throughout your time at Swarthmore, and brought together the college’s first nationally competing slam poetry team. How did you find your way to Swarthmore’s spoken word community? How did your involvement with OASiS shape your time here?
NQ: In high school, I was involved in Urban Word, which is a New York City youth poetry organization. It was a bunch of teenagers from all five boroughs, coming together and encouraging each other, going to workshops, learning. So I was already doing spoken word for two or three years before I got to Swarthmore, and OASiS was actually part of the reason I chose to come here. I performed at an open mic during Orientation Week, and the founders of OASiS were immediately like, “You. You need to be a part of this.” Soon enough, I was on the organizing team, and I was just so excited to be a part of that community. The beautiful thing for me about OASiS was that, yes, we had open mics and slams and performances, but the core of it was that we met every week to do workshops. And sometimes we didn’t get to the writing. But it was just the fact that we all hung out in some room in Kohlberg, and would just be trying stuff out and reading drafts to each other and having fun. On top of that, it was people from different grades, which was really important to me as a freshman.
ZW: How was your experience of Swarthmore outside of OASiS? What did you love, what didn’t you love, and how did those factors inform the person (and the poet) you became?
NQ: It was really rough academically, and at the same time, very satisfying. This is the level I wanted to work at. I wanted to be challenged in these ways. All of us come here because we find learning exciting, and we find academic challenges exciting. But the ways that played out in terms of stress were concerning. I don’t know if y’all still have this saying, but a saying we always had about Swarthmore was, “No one is competing against each other.” That was always a beautiful part of being here. But the thing was, you had all these kids, these self-motivated, incredibly driven people, and that means that they’re all competing with themselves. One of the scariest things for me about being at Swarthmore was just the level of self-flagellation, the level at which we were beating ourselves up for not getting the highest honors, for not getting an “A.” Meanwhile, professors are openly saying to our faces, “Oh, yeah, this is Swarthmore, we don’t give As.” It was just such a dangerous cycle. It was very upsetting to me that Swarthmore was proud of this.
ZW: If you could do it all over again, would you choose a different school?
NQ: Actually, I got here last night and I walked around the whole campus, just going down memory lane, and I called one of my best friends from Swarthmore. We were just sharing stories and talking things out, and at the end of the phone call, she was like, “You know, do you regret it? Would you have chosen someplace else?” And I was like, “You know, no.” I would still come here. I still had such a great time. I’m still so close to so many people I went to school with here. I just met some of the best people. I mean, smart, of course, but also just really amazing, kind, down-to-earth people. There was always an openness: whatever you’re really passionate about, you can bring it here and we will converse about it. And I think that’s the special sauce.
ZW: What, in your opinion, allows the college to cultivate an environment of that kind?
NQ: I think the admissions office is very, very good at picking this type of student. I don’t know what it is. I’ve never been on that side of it. I’m friends with some people who worked on Swarthmore admissions, and this is definitely a question I want to ask them. And I don’t want to fall into the trap of being like, “we’re special” or “we’re different,” you know? There are many liberal arts institutions across the country that I’m sure are very similar. But this is the one I came to. And I have to imagine, now that we’re finally having larger national conversations about neurodivergence, that we’ll find that the Venn diagram of neurodivergent college students and the Swarthmore population is like this [they interlace their fingers]. I know that the numbers are high. And many studies have linked neurodivergence to empathy. It’s linked to understanding, it’s linked to creativity and rigor.
ZW: And how was your experience of Swarthmore as a person of color?
NQ: Of course, Swarthmore is a predominantly white institution, but I have to say – we were able to carve out a space for students of color that I just haven’t been able to cultivate anywhere else in the same way. The [Black Cultural Center] was my second home. We just spent so much time there. We had movie nights, pool nights, barbecues, club meetings, open mics. We had our Thanksgiving there. It really was a space for us, and it’s just crazy to me to think that we were able to have that within the midst of all the rest of it.
ZW: You’re both a writer and an educator. How do these roles intersect? How does your work as a poet inform your teaching, and how does your teaching inform your work?
NQ: I was an English major and an education minor. I don’t know if they still have this, but at the time Swarthmore had an educational program that allowed you to get certified as a teacher in the state of Pennsylvania [Note: for anyone interested, this program is still offered]. For a whole semester, I taught English literature at a high school in Philly, Monday through Friday. It was very rigorous. But I mention that to say that my identity as a creative writer has always gone hand in hand with my identity as a teacher. My mom was a teacher, and I knew from a very young age that I was going to teach in some capacity. I’ve taught high school for seven years, I’m teaching college right now, and I’m a teaching artist, so I teach poetry at public middle schools in Chicago. All of that to say – I think if you’re teaching creative writing as a technical skill, it’s hard to teach. But that’s not my approach. My approach is this: we would all benefit as humans if we wrote about our experiences and our feelings. And that’s really simple for people of all ages. I’ve taught workshops at elementary schools and at elderly homes. I’ve taught in prisons and juvenile detention centers, and it really is the same everywhere. It’s like, “Hey, tell me how you feel about this thing. Tell me how your day was.” And people will write.
ZW: During your time as an English major, you must have taken a fair amount of courses on literary theory and criticism. Do you feel that those courses helped your own creative work?
NQ [chuckling]: So, I’m laughing because I tried so hard to avoid those classes as much as possible. And I tried really hard to take literary criticism classes that were not focused on the British or white American canon. I know professor Foy’s still here, and I took a fantastic class on Black American literature with him. I took a Native American literature course that was amazing. And we were really angry that there wasn’t a Latino literature class, and so we yelled about it for a while. They eventually brought in a visiting professor just to teach that one class, and bless his heart, but he was not a good professor. I did end up taking an awesome Latino literature class at Bryn Mawr. And there’s a mandatory theory class for English majors that you had to take during junior or senior year, which was incredibly hard. All of that to say – those classes didn’t directly help me with my poetry, even the workshops I took. They were just so different from what I was coming from, from New York and spoken word, and I think I was definitely averse to it. I think I would have learned more if I was more open. Ultimately, though, even if they didn’t necessarily help my writing at the time, those classes opened doors for me. They helped me to understand the vastness of what literature can be. For example, in that senior theory class, we critically analyzed “Mercy” by Tony Morrison. It was such a difficult book, and I appreciated it for that. It made me realize how much was possible with writing. And then, while most people have to do a critical thesis for their English major, I ended up writing a poetry book. Professor Schmidt was my advisor. Love that man.
ZW: Do you wish that Swarthmore’s English department offered courses on spoken word?
NQ: I really do. That’s something I’m trying to advocate for right now, actually. I’m looking for a college teaching job where they would let me do that. I think we’ve gotten far enough that you could teach a whole class on the history of spoken word poetry. But there’s still that tension between academia and the realm of spoken word, sadly. But yeah, God, I would love to teach that. I would love to come back to Swarthmore to teach that because there’s just so much there. And I say this not to knock the literary poetry workshops. But you need options. You need these different spaces that are both legitimate ways to teach this art form. I think that a lot of people would be more open to poetry if we taught it differently.
ZW: When you say “differently,” are you referring to the inclusion of spoken word and performance-based poetry specifically?
NQ: No, I don’t just mean spoken word. We need to be thinking about the accessibility of language and diction, and pulling ourselves away from focusing solely on the Western canon of poetry. So many people are terrified by the word “poetry,” because all they think about it is the hardcore Shakespearean sonnets, and they think, “No, I could never do that.” And it’s damaging the potential for people to be more open to what poetry can do. And at the same time, I’ve seen poetry change people’s lives, as soon as they were like, “All I have to do is write about how I feel. Yes.”
ZW: What kind of change would you like to see at Swarthmore beyond the English department?
NQ: I want a mandatory seminar, something that students take every year, that’s like, “Hey, your worth is not directly correlated to getting As in a place that prides itself on not giving As as much as other schools.” There just has to be something. I saw so many people here just break – I mean, just clear panic attacks, and anxiety, and depression. I’m not saying that’s fully connected to the academic pressure, but the academic pressure definitely did not help. So that’s what I hope will change. Swarthmore already has such an amazing community, so many great events and student groups. We could still have that incredible camaraderie, and that intellectual curiosity and rigor, without having such emotionally damaging pressure. I really believe that that’s possible.
ZW: As we wrap up, do you have any advice for current Swarthmore students who are interested in creative writing? NQ [grinning]: OASiS, OASiS, OASiS.
