[1] The author of five books and many academic articles, she published on the Catholic Church's engagement with modernist poetry, particularly in works by Flannery O'Connor, Denise Levertov, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Randall Jarrell, all of whom were among her many literary correspondents.
[9][10] Flannery O'Connor, a Catholic who attended daily mass, spoke highly of “the Sister at Minneapolis that writes such good poetry.
[12] Quinn's poem, "Children Carrying Wood," appeared in Art Journal in 1962, and "In Branches of Spruce" in The Sewanee Review in 1963.
[13][14] She published five books, Motive and Method in the Cantos of Ezra Pound (with Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, and Forrest Read Jr.) (Columbia University Press, 1953), The Metamorphic Tradition in Modern Poetry (1955), reviewed by such figures as R. W. B. Lewis, David Ferry, Austin Warren, and Hazard Adams, Give Me Souls: A Life of Raphael Cardinal Merry del Val (Newman Press 1958), reviewed in the New York Times, To God Alone the Glory: A Life of St. Bonaventure (1962), and Ezra Pound: An Introduction to the Poetry (Columbia Introductions to Twentieth-Century American Poetry, 1972).
[20][21][22] She had significant letter-writing correspondences with major literary figures including Flannery O'Connor and her mother Regina, novelists Caroline Gordon, Doris Betts, Sylvia Wilkinson, Peter Taylor, Shelby Stephenson, Robie Macauley, and Robert Penn Warren, writer and painter Guy Davenport, the poets Denise Levertov, Gibbons Ruark, Grace DiSanto, Fred Chappell, James Laughlin, Robert Lowell, Robert Bly, Seamus Heaney, James Wright, Wallace Stevens, Richard Wilbur, and Allen Tate, the Italian-American poet and translator Mary de Rachewiltz (daughter of Ezra Pound), and violinist Olga Rudge (Pound's longtime companion), critic Frank Tuohy, and philosopher Donald Davidson.
[4] She died on February 24, 2003, leaving an unfinished draft of Pilgrimage to the Stars, a book for children about Dante's Divine Comedy, which is housed in UNC-Chapel Hill's special collections.