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.
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.
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.
