Raquel Gutierrez and Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta in conversation about Gutierrez's debut essay collection, Brown Neon.

Raquel Gutiérrez is an arts critic, writer, poet, and educator. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Gutiérrez credits the queer and feminist diy, post-punk zine culture of the 1990s, plus Los Angeles County and Getty paid arts internships, for introducing them to the various vibrant art and music scenes and communities throughout Southern California. Gutiérrez is a 2021 recipient of the Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism and a 2017 recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. They are faculty for Oregon State University–Cascades’ Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing. Their new book Brown Neon is out now on Coffee House Press.

Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta was raised in Los Angeles, California by a family of single women, and grew up traveling and living across the western United States and Mexico with their mother, a cultural anthropologist. Their latest book is La Movida, published by Nightboat Books in 2022. Tatiana’s first book, The Easy Body, was published by Timeless, Infinite Light in 2017; their writing has appeared in SFMOMA Open Space and Wolfman New Life Quarterly. They live in a rent controlled apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco, around the corner from where they work as a barista at a pop and pop café video rental store hybrid and as a peer sexual health educator at CCSF’s Project SURVIVE.