Raquel Gutiérrez

Poetry has guided me towards a language that strengthens community and cultural bonds. I interrogate my relationship to space and family, power and empire through the poetic line and criticism. I cultivated my practice so that it could function as an invitation to readers and spectators to consider the ways we are positioned by the invisible hand of empire to stand against each other as well as against our own interests and desires for care and liberation. I am interested in the ways the power of language instructs us to laterally dispossess those whose intellectual contributions to their communities and ecosystems are not structured by institutions or the state. Poetry is a divining rod for ancestral communication that breaks down the codes in suspicion of mestizaje. An informed intuition guides me into what James Longenbach calls "the aura of the unsaid" or what we (as poet and reader) interrogate when seeing the settler in the mirror.

Raquel Gutiérrez is a poet and writer whose work is rooted in explorations of movement, mobility, power, and migration from Mexico and Central America to and within the United States—particularly Southern California where they were born and raised. These explorations elaborate on Gutiérrez’s perspective as a queer and brown writer engaging histories of desire, labor, dispossession, and colonization in the formation of state out of frontier, and empire out of unceded land. Their interdisciplinary engagements with performance studies, autotheory, and experimental memoir have propelled them towards a questioning of artistic identity, politics, and performativity.

Living in the borderlands of Tucson, Arizona since 2018 has fine-tuned Gutiérrez's writing, particularly their critical and creative nonfiction, for a wider audience of arts practitioners and cultural organizers. Their first book, Brown Neon (Coffee House Press, 2022) is a sustained address to the relational and Southwest terrains through which they have traveled. Gutiérrez arrives at various points in this conceptual map to narrate the ways in which contemporary artists have responded to the cultural zeitgeist of Donald Trump’s America. For Gutiérrez, these are discursive altars they offer to the people who constitute a chosen queer family, and to their labor as queer and brown workers often excluded from the canon of contemporary art and practice. In fall of 2025, Gutierrez's poetic study of the settler as self, entitled Southwest Reconstruction, will be published by Noemi Press.

Gutiérrez has participated in a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA (2024) and was awarded the United States Artist Fellowship (2025), the Irene Yamamoto Arts Writers Fellowship (2023), the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction from The Publishing Triangle (2023), the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism (2021), and The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in Short Form Writing (2017). They were a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir/Biography (2023).