Works by Danni Quintos
Black Bone by Call Number: 821.914 B624 2017 - Circulating (3rd Floor)Publication Date: 2018"Pond's White Beauty" by Danni Quintos
"Portrait of My Dad Through a Tent Window" by Danni Quintos
Two Brown Dots by Call Number: On OrderISBN: 9781950774517Publication Date: 2022-04-12Selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, Danni Quintos carves a space for brown girls and weird girls in her debut collection of poems. Two Brown Dots explores what it means to be a racially ambiguous, multiethnic, Asian American woman growing up in Kentucky. In stark, honest poems, Quintos recounts the messiness and confusion of being a typical '90s kid--watching Dirty Dancing at sleepovers, borrowing eye shadow out of a friend's caboodle, crushing on a boy wearing khaki shorts to Sunday mass--while navigating the microagressions of the neighbor kids, the awkwardness of puberty, and the casual cruelties of fellow teenagers. The mixed-race daughter of a dark skinned Filipino immigrant, Quintos retells family stories and Phillipine folklore to try and make sense of an identity with roots on opposite sides of the globe. With clear-eyed candor and a wry sense of humor, Quintos teases the line between tokenism and representation, between assimilation and belonging, offering a potent antidote to the assumption that "American" means "white." Encompassing a whole journey from girlhood to motherhood, Two Brown Dots subverts stereotypes to reclaim agency and pride in the realness and rawness and unprettyness of a brown girl's body, boldly declaring: We exist, we belong, we are from here, and we will continue to be.
Biography
DANNI QUINTOS is a knitter and a Kentuckian. She received her MFA in Poetry from Indiana University, where she taught Creative Writing and served as an Associate Poetry Editor for Indiana Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Day One, pluck!, Anthropoid, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, Best New Poets 2015 and elsewhere. She lives in Lexington with her husband Zach and their Ren & Stimpy cat-dog duo. Rumor has it, she is knitting a cocoon, from which she will emerge when her first book manuscript is finished
source:
Spriggs, Bianca Lynne, and Jeremy Paden, editors. “Biographies.” Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 2017, pp. 151–156.
