The Sacramento Public Library is proud to welcome poet, author, and educator Sonia Gutierrez.

Click to register for Zoom Webinar.  

Click to learn more about our Latino Heritage 2022 Series. 

Moderated by Xico González, a Sacramento-based artist, educator, and social justice advocate

Copies of Sonia’s book Dreaming with Mariposas are available for sale at A Seat at the Table Books in Elk Grove.

Sonia Gutiérrez is the recipient of the Tomás Rivera Book Award 2021 and the International Latino Book Awards 2022 for her novel Dreaming with Mariposas (FlowerSong Press, 2020). In 2021, Dreaming with Mariposas also received an honorable mention for the Isabel Allende Most Inspirational Fiction Award from the International Latino Book Awards and a finalist for the International Book Awards. She is the author of Spider Woman / La Mujer Araña (Olmeca Press, 2013) and co-editor for The Writer’s Response (Cengage Learning, 2016). She teaches critical thinking and writing, creative writing, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Her bilingual poetry collection, Paper Birds: Feather by Feather / Pájaros de papel: Pluma por pluma, is forthcoming in 2022. Presently, she is working on her first illustrated book, The Adventures of a Burrito Flying Saucer, and teaching in cyberland. 

“This is Chicana literature at its best. Sonia Gutiérrez captures and reworks the ethos, the languages, and the memory of an entire tradition of letters, oral tales, and experiences that have shaped and continue to shape the collective imaginary. As in her Tomás Rivera epigraph, Gutiérrez grows great big artistic arms to embrace humans, ghosts, and butterflies, and to present them to her audience in a beautiful ofrenda of must-read stories.”

—Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez, University of California, Merced

 “Sonia Gutiérrez reminds one of our elders offering us blessings in our youth. These vignettes are like the energy that connects the synapses in our body and the emotions infused in them bring warmth to the soul; and as fleeting as a soft cool breeze, they offer a fragrance that is remembered, etched and made tangible. The memories and narratives told are unrelenting and nourishing, they provide a vulnerability in their confessions.”

—Gibrán Güido, co-editor of Queer in Aztlán: Chicano Male Recollections of Consciousness

 “Sonia Gutiérrez carries the torch of her literary forbearers Tomás Rivera and Sandra Cisneros, powerfully and poetically capturing what it's like to grow up as a brown girl in America. Dreaming with Mariposas takes us from Idaho to Southern California, detailing the struggles and joys of a working-class immigrant family, and shows us with fresh eyes the lessons learned navigating childhood's difficult terrain. Gutiérrez pays homage to the classics of Chicanx literature, but this book is also a necessary update, a coming-of-age story for our time.”

—Maceo Montoya, author of The Deportation of Wopper Barraza