The Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction

Special Guest Judge, Raquel Gutiérrez:

“Scarifying” provided a powerful reading experience. It is an essay work that braids the tyrannies cast upon the feminine experience like scar tissue. The prose is both propulsive and provocative in this inventory of the risks and misses entailed in the limits of the body. The body is rendered here as our first line of defense and the essay asks, when does our capitulation to vulnerability exceed our spiritual and relational limits? And will there be healing afterward? I appreciate the writer’s considerations of embodiment, pain and survival in the critical lenses of history, memory and ritual.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Raquel Gutiérrez is a critic, essayist, poet, performer, and educator. Raquel’s first book Brown Neon (Coffee House Press) was named as one of the best books of 2022 by The New Yorker and listed in The Best Art Books of 2022 by Hyperallergic. They have a poetry manuscript under contract with Noemi Press and work on a range of topics that have continued to inform their writing and teaching, including critical race theory, Queer and Latinx aesthetics and performance art in the Americas. Raquel has recently published in Places Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, Art in America, and The Georgia Review. Raquel lives in Tucson with their spouse and their dog, Lalo.