Our current exhibit showcases an author event held in the library on November 10th, 2021. For upcoming events, please visit our Library Events Calendar.
November 10th, 2021
Illustration by Arthur Johnstone
The HNU Cushing Library was joined by Freddy Gutierrez, HNU's Director of the Center for Social Justice and Civic Engagement and adjunct faculty member in the English department on November 10th, 2021 at 5:00 PM over Zoom. Freddy read from his book, Nueva Cuenta. He was joined by Laura Lyndon, HNU's Vice President for Student Affairs who participated in the Confronting Racism Certificate course, Telling Your Story, taught by Freddy this past fall. Readings were followed by a discussion and Q&A.
In Nueva Cuenta, Gutierrez’s poems illuminate parallels between a personal sense of indigenized identity and the legacy of colonialism via the California Mission system and its impact on the local ecology.
Praise for Nueva Cuenta
“Our people need new prayers from our first tongues. Nueva Cuenta shows that a soul in its lucid wandering is both the presentation of mathematical brilliance and visceral mystery; that the poet is the incarnation in a circle of instructors who crafts reminders that origin is future and every line of our story is food for beauty and resistance. Here is a song to take with you on our fight for liberation; to take with us on all of our returns to earth and essence. Be fit for the run . . . rise en masse.”
– Tongo Eisen-Martin, author of someone’s dead already (2015)
“In Freddy Gutierrez’ poetry, language skips and repeats like the past, in all its disastrous beauty, in order to sing a new future into being. He sings for himself and always others. In Nueva Cuenta, a song of the land emerges, the story of European arrivals and indigenous resistance, the particularity of plants, the pain of history, the possibility of recovery, and the dream of a world that could be otherwise.”
– Stephanie Young, author of Telling the Future Off (2005), Picture Palace (2008), and Ursula or University (2013)
From Nomadic Press
Nueva Cuenta by 
Dated Emcees by 
Poet in New York by 
Bright Dead Things by 
Night Sky with Exit Wounds by 
Cannibal by 
Citizen by 
Tender Data by 
Salt Is for Curing by 
Island by 
Poetry and Displacement by The following authors were mentioned during our event: