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Book Cover for: Two Brown Dots, Danni Quintos

Two Brown Dots

Danni Quintos

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Selected 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.

Book Details

  • Publisher: BOA Editions
  • Publish Date: Apr 12nd, 2022
  • Pages: 112
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.90in - 6.90in - 0.60in - 0.45lb
  • EAN: 9781950774517
  • Categories: • American - Asian American & Pacific Islander• Women Authors• Subjects & Themes - Family

About the Author

Quintos, Danni: - Danni Quintos is the author of Two Brown Dots (BOA, 2022), which won the 20th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. She is also the author of PYTHON (Argus House, 2017), an ekphrastic chapbook featuring photography by her sister, Shelli Quintos. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2015, Cream City Review, Day One, Pluck!, Salon, and elsewhere. Her knitting has appeared on the shoulders and heads of many writers and artists, who are also friends and teachers. She received her MFA in Poetry from Indiana University. A Kentuckian, a mom, an educator, and an Affrilachian Poet, Quintos lives in Lexington, KY.
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee: - Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Oceanic (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. She is also the author of The New York Times bestselling illustrated collection of nature essays World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments (Milkweed Editions, 2020), which was selected as Barnes and Noble's 2020 Book of the Year and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. Her most recent chapbook is LACE & PYRITE, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House. Her honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, a Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. In 2021, she became the first-ever poetry editor for SIERRA magazine, the storytelling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.

What people are saying

Mentioner image for: Asian American Writers' Workshop
Asian American Writers' Workshop
@aaww
2 years

Celebrating over 30 years of amplifying Asian American & Asian diasporic literature to mobilize for a more just future. Subscribe → https://t.co/3swae68H0e

Next up is Devyn's lovely stack with "Customs" by Solmaz Sharif, "Time Regime" by Jhani Randhawa, "Two Brown Dots" by danni Quintos, "The Sleepless" by @VictorManibo, and "Gods of Want" by K-Ming Chang 🎄🐉 https://t.co/2jy0m0NEBp

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Mentioner image for: BOA Editions
BOA Editions
@boaeditions
2 years

Indie publisher of poetry & literature. Fostering appreciation of contemporary lit for 45 years. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and more! 📚

Our thanks to @adalimon and @slowdownshow for featuring "Ghazal for Dogeaters" by @dleighquint from her debut collection TWO BROWN DOTS on today's program! Listen here: https://www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2022/07/20/722-ghazal-for-dogeaters

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Mentioner image for: Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
@aimeenez
3 years

🇵🇭🇮🇳 New York Times bestselling author of WORLD OF WONDERS (nature essays) • glitter & narwhals & roller-skates • 4 books of poems too • @CurtisBrownLtd

Happy Pub Week to DANNI QUINTOS! Her book TWO BROWN DOTS is out of this world good and won the Poulin Prize from @boaeditions https://t.co/3ChF2Pid53

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Praise for this book

"With remarkable humor and candor, Danni Quintos blazes across these pages in a most magical debut. You'll be utterly charmed and entranced by her poems, which ignite questions of desire and justice rarely offered- unless one amalgamates folklore and childhood in such a brilliantly expansive, moving way. This is it. This is the one you were waiting for."

-- Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments


"Who but the Filipina girl, the keen discerning granddaughter of lola, with the unquiet mind, could turn the hurt and brutality, the invisibility of coming of age in late 20th century America, into an iridescent book of modern day brown girl psalms."
-- Nikky Finney, author of Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems and Artifacts


"Danni Quintos's book Two Brown Dots, in addition to thinking hard about motherhood, the body, ancestry, and more, is one of the most beautiful and tender and honest depictions of the youthful negotiations of racism I've ever read: the lostness, the entanglements, the confusions, the hurts, the loves. How many times I gasped or dropped my head into my hands or shook my head in recognition at how clearly, how precisely, she depicted what I have felt but never quite had the words or courage to say. It is a wonder how poems can care for us like that. It is a mercy."
-- Ross Gay, author of Be Holding



What people are saying

Mentioner image for: Asian American Writers' Workshop
Asian American Writers' Workshop
@aaww
2 years

Celebrating over 30 years of amplifying Asian American & Asian diasporic literature to mobilize for a more just future. Subscribe → https://t.co/3swae68H0e

Next up is Devyn's lovely stack with "Customs" by Solmaz Sharif, "Time Regime" by Jhani Randhawa, "Two Brown Dots" by danni Quintos, "The Sleepless" by @VictorManibo, and "Gods of Want" by K-Ming Chang 🎄🐉 https://t.co/2jy0m0NEBp

twitter.com
Mentioner image for: BOA Editions
BOA Editions
@boaeditions
2 years

Indie publisher of poetry & literature. Fostering appreciation of contemporary lit for 45 years. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and more! 📚

Our thanks to @adalimon and @slowdownshow for featuring "Ghazal for Dogeaters" by @dleighquint from her debut collection TWO BROWN DOTS on today's program! Listen here: https://www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2022/07/20/722-ghazal-for-dogeaters

twitter.com
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