Event Details - Raquel Gutierrez reading

Raquel Gutiérrez is a writer and art critic who grew up in Los Angeles and now lives in Tuscon, Arizona where they completed an MFA in poetry and non-fiction. They also have an MA in Performance Studies. A 2017 recipient of the Creative Capital Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, Raquel also runs the tiny press Econo Textual Objects (established 2014), which publishes intimate works by QTPOC poets. Raquel’s poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Los Angeles Review of Books, Fence, the Texas Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. Their first book of poetry, Southwest Reconstruction, will be published by Noemi Press in 2022.

Rachel Leon writes in LARB that “Gutiérrez’s work is in constant motion, weaving between art criticism, queer history, cultural and political commentary, memoir, travelogue — a reminder that identity forms in relation, not isolation. Brown Neon is a story about intergenerational Latinx queer mentorship, about land art and the border wall, and about immigration. Gutiérrez writes, “We are people connected to immigrants and migrants in deep and complex matrices — as their children, their lovers, their friends, their bosses, their customers, their neighbors, or if we are lucky, their students. Some of us will never know that direct experience of moving across harrowing terrain. We will never know the hard choices made to begin those journeys.”