Cascadia Poetics Lab board member Dr. Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs interview with sociology blog Sociology Group

In the interview, Gutiérrez y Muhs discusses her journey from child farmworker to a professor with multiple degrees from multiple institutions, including Stanford University and Occidental College, and explains the values she learned from her working class background that she was able to incorporate later into academia. She also mentions her role as the 2018-2020 Theiline Pigott McCone Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Seattle University and her role as editor for Presumed Incompetent, both positions allowing her to focus on uplifting Chicanx and Latinx voices and highlight experiences of unequal treatment for POC, queer and working class people in academia.

She talks about her book How Many Indians Can We Be?, its themes of colonization, social class, immigration and more, and her experience visiting India serving as inspiration for parts of the book. She also mentions her upcoming memoir Fresh as Lettuce: A Memoir, which will be released this upcoming December. In her closing statement, “May we all experience our own personal paradigm shifts in collaboration with just causes, as we improve the world for generations to come, across the globe,” Dr. Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs describes the respect, perseverance and inspiration taught in her own classrooms that we all can internalize and carry with us. Read the full interview HERE.

Professor Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs is one of the newest board members of Cascadia Poetics Lab, joining the board in 2023 along with poet and activist Lorna Dee Cervantes. We are incredibly grateful for their dedication to our organization, and are proud to say that our board is officially composed of 50% women and 50% Latinx individuals. More information on our board members is available HERE.