Poet-dramatist Cindy Williams Gutiérrez is inspired by the silent and silenced voices of history and herstory. Her new collection, Inlay with Nacre: The Names of Forgotten Women, was awarded the 2018 Willow Books Editor’s Choice Poetry Selection and a 2016 Oregon Literary Fellowship. She was selected by Poets & Writers Magazine as a 2014 Notable Debut Poet for her poetry collection, the small claim of bones (Bilingual Press/Arizona State University), which placed second in the 2015 International Latino Book Awards. Her poems have appeared in Borderlands, Calyx, Harvard’s Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and UNAM’s Periódico de poesía. Cindy received the 2017 Oregon Book Award for Drama for Words That Burn, a dramatization of the WWII experiences of conscientious-objector William Stafford, Japanese-American internee Lawson Inada, and Chicano Marine Guy Gabaldón.
Cindy earned an MFA from the University of Southern Maine Stonecoast MFA Program with concentrations in Mesoamerican poetics, drama, and creative collaboration. She is a cofounder of Los Porteños, Portland’s Latino writers’ collective, and the founder of El Grupo de ’08, a Lorca-inspired, Northwest collaborative-artists’ salon. Cindy has taught poetry to youth in every grade from K-12 through the Methow Arts Alliance, Portland Art Museum, Right Brain Initiative, and Writers in the Schools.
