2016-17 POET LAUREATE OF TEXAS
LAURIE ANN
GUERRERO
2014-16 POET LAUREATE OF SAN ANTONIO
Poet and essayist, Laurie Ann Guerrero was born and raised in the Southside of San Antonio and is the author of REDWORK, winner of the 2025 Autumn House Poetry Award, forthcoming in October 2026. Poet Laureate Emeritus of San Antonio (2014-16) and Texas (2016-2017), her other award-winning collections, along with a volume of new & selected poems, include Babies under the Skin (Panhandler 2008), A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying (University of Notre Dame Press 2013), A Crown for Gumecindo, a collaboration with visual artist, Maceo Montoya (Aztlan Libre Press 2015), and I Have Eaten the Rattlesnake: New & Selected Poems (TCU Press 2021).
Guerrero’s honors include a Panhandler Chapbook Award, the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize from the Institute of Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, an International Latino Book Award, the Helen C. Smith Award for poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters, and NBC Latino listed hers as a must-read work of Chicano literature. Other honors include grants from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio, the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation, and the College of Arts and Sciences at Texas A&M-San Antonio. Guerrero is a Harlandale Independent School District Hall of Fame Honoree and was the United States representative at Hunan Normal University’s opening of the British and American Poetry Research Center in Changsha, China.
Guerrero holds a B.A. in English Language & Literature from Smith College and an MFA in poetry from Drew University. She is an Associate Professor and the Writer-in-Residence at Texas A&M University-San Antonio where she teaches writing and gender studies. Her poem, "Along the Medina," is on permanent display, spanning the height of two floors, in Business Library Hall on the Texas A&M-SA campus, where she is currently at work on a novel set in both present day and 1800s San Antonio.
Congratulations Laurie Ann!
Winner of the 2025 Autumn House Poetry Prize
REDWORK
available October 2026 from Autumn House Press
Comprised of lyric essays, traditional poems, and embroidered (textile/fiber art) poems, REDWORK examines subversive female art and revolution under the guise of domesticity. In her fifth collection, Guerrero researched the work of women in communities at home, in China, in Mexico, and in France to investigate needlework (piety) and language (rebellion). Her poems dissect domestic violence, guns, rape, gender dynamics, familial and societal traditions, mothers, and mothering. Guerrero bridges the theory of quantum entanglement with ancestral wisdom and "home craft" resulting in the revalorization of women's work. Stitch by stitch, Guerrero highlights women's ability to unravel, re-stitch, re-member their bodies and the bodies they make, noting embroidery as both a tool for and a product of the subversive and necessary magic contained within the (unvalued) body and the (unvalued) body of work.