Rae: lexical powerhouse. Rae: scientist of intimacies. The words burst as though the poet could not contain them.
—Thylias Moss
Her capacity for eloquence is as vast as her rhetoric is supple.
—Raymond McDaniel
Gouirand’s voice is hypnotic and potent.
—Natalie Eilbert
Hers is a new music, indeed a new order of language altogether.
—Richard Howard
A queer poet working in both verse and prose, Rae Gouirand is the author of a book-length poem, The Velvet Book (Cornerstone Press, 2024, a 2025 Lambda Literary Award finalist); three collections of poetry, Whatever Dimness or Brightness (Cornerstone Press, 2026), Glass is Glass Water is Water (Spork Press, 2018), and Open Winter (winner of the Bellday Prize, Bellday Books, 2011); the chapbooks Rough Sequence (winner of the Keystone Chapbook Award, 2023), Little Hour (winner of the Swan Scythe Chapbook Contest, 2022), Jinx (winner of the Summer Kitchen Competition, 2019) and Must Apple (winner of the Oro Fino Competition, 2018); and a short work of nonfiction, The History of Art(winner of The Atlas Review’s Open Competition, 2019). Her work has appeared in over one hundred journals nationwide, including American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, Foglifter, The Iowa Review, jubilat, The Kenyon Review, the Lambda Literary Poetry Spotlight, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Spinning Jenny, Under a Warm Green Linden, ZYZZYVA, as well as two volumes of the Best New Poets series, Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology, and many other anthologies.
Since putting down California roots in 2003, she has founded several longrunning workshops in poetry and prose throughout the Sacramento Valley, served as Writer-in-Residence for the nation’s only conservancy-sponsored public arts program at Cache Creek Nature Preserve, and worked with the literary nonprofit Memoir Journal to develop a national platform for the (In)Visible Memoirs project, a grant-funded program facilitating writing workshops in underserved communities. In recent years she has served as guest editor for Sporklet, OCHO: A Journal of Queer Arts, and a special issue of Adanna in tribute to Adrienne Rich, and as Nonfiction Editor for California Northern magazine. An alumna of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA program at the University of Michigan, she has received fellowships for her work from the Vermont Studio Center, the Santa Fe Art Institute, Kalani, Willapa Bay AiR, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, In Cahoots, Writing Between the Vines, VCCA, and the Desert Rat Writer-in-Residence program. A leader in community-based programming for writers for more than twenty years, she leads several longrunning independent workshops in northern California and online, and serves as a Continuing Lecturer in the Department of English at UC-Davis, where she teaches poetry, creative nonfiction, short fiction, and creative writing pedagogy.
Email Rae at rgouirand (at) gmail (dot) com.
