Raquel Gutiérrez is a critic, essayist, poet, performer, and educator. Gutiérrez's first book Brown Neon (Coffee House Press) was named as one of the best books of 2022 by The New Yorker and Hyperallergic. Brown Neon was a 2023 Finalist for the Lambda Literary Prize for Best Lesbian Biography/Memoir, a 2023 Finalist for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses' Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction, and received The Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction. Gutiérrez is a 2021 recipient of the Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism and a 2017 recipient of the The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. In 2024, Gutiérrez was an Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and the inaugural Writer-In-Residence in the art department at Whittier College in Southern California. 

Gutiérrez’s poetry collection, Southwest Reconstruction (working title), will be published by Noemi Press in fall 2025. Gutiérrez is currently working on a new essay collection examining relational complexities to systems and symbols of state power, as well as a novel that considers networks of radical affinities in Los Angeles in the 1980s.