Laurie Ann Guerrero turns to needlework and embroidery as both artistic practice and poetic language in REDWORK (Autumn House Press, 2026), winner of the 2025 Autumn House Poetry Prize. The collection weaves together lineage, trauma, violence, love, motherhood, politics, and survival, demonstrating how the act of making—of stitching, layering, cutting, and piecing together—can become a way of understanding what language alone cannot always hold. The poems and visual elements ask us to consider how craft can become a form of memory, resistance, and survival.
My relationship to Laurie Ann’s work began long before this interview. I first met her in 2014, when she visited my Mexican American Literature class after the publication of A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013). I remember being struck not only by the poems, but by the possibility her work represented: that poetry could speak directly to where I came from, to San Antonio, to our histories, and to the complicated ways writing can become an act of resistance. After that visit, I began looking for more ways to become involved in poetry.
More than a decade later, I found myself sitting with Laurie Ann Guerrero in her home, working together on this interview and talking about REDWORK. That moment felt like a kind of return, not simply to the poet whose work had influenced my own path, but to a conversation about what poetry can do, what art can preserve, and how we make meaning from the materials of our lives.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Rumpus: The color red is symbolic throughout the collection and is also in the title of your collection, it can also be seen in the eight images you embroidered with cotton thread, DMC red #489, which are featured throughout the book. What is the importance and significance of the color red and why is it vital for this collection?
Laurie Ann Guerrero: As we all know, red symbolizes so many things—blood, fire, energy, anger, love, those elements that make up a body, a home. When I discovered redwork—the art of embroidery work done all in red stitches—as a little girl, I was fascinated by how it was used: baby blankets, kitchen towels. That it was so different from the usual pastel-centric household items spoke of a kind of rebellion to me. I loved it. I wasn’t quite aware, nor could I articulate, how or why it was important, I just loved the subversion of tradition. The word “redwork,” eventually became bigger than a kind of embroidery, but a reworking of tradition, resourcefulness, home-making, evolution and revolution that was represented by the process of embroidery.
Rumpus: Can you tell us a bit more about the process of embroidery transforming into poetry? How did you realize you were creating something more than a pattern? Or did it begin as patterns and then evolve into images and poetry? Is embroidery a new process for you to create poetry, or have both been in conversation with each other beforehand?
Guerrero: I returned to embroidery, as I often had, as a break from writing. I do the same with paint—watercolor, acrylic, and oil—which I get tired of, and it turns me back to my writing. But this time, I wasn’t taking a break. I just wasn’t sure how to say what was bubbling up in me. I was overwhelmed by having too much to say, and I was having a hard time focusing on one thing—my work, my children, the government, the end of my family as I had known it. A part of me felt like I was running away from the urgency. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to not feel a need to say anything. But I’ve been writing since I was a very little girl, and I knew that writing would help me process what was happening in my life. Still, I didn’t want to exert energy to do the processing. It was taking all the energy I had just to keep a job, keep my babies healthy. Embroidery felt like the thing I needed that was quiet, that would result in something I could look at and know it carried all I could not say, didn’t want to say, wasn’t ready to say.
So I started with drawing images I wanted to hang in my house, which is actually how I started painting—I couldn’t afford art, so I started making art when I was in my first apartment at eighteen. The embroidery was inspired by images by Louise Bourgeois. Then I started delving into her history and fell in love. She felt familiar. Her work felt familiar, and she knew to create when speaking wasn’t enough.
The embroidery came first. But as I read and researched and discovered and met other women who worked with their hands, the connection made it so that I had to start writing. I hadn’t set out to create this book—I would have never imagined centering a book on embroidery. I just gathered my findings, writing and processes, all the while learning to hold tightly to lessons learned and not hold so tightly to babies who were no longer babies.
That said, I look back at my first full collection, A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying, which was published thirteen years ago, but which I had been working on for at least ten years before that… And it shocks me to see just how important the act of embroidery has been to my process. In that book, I have a poem called, “Ode to a Skein of Red Embroidery Thread,” the cover image is surrounded by red stitches, and underneath the title of each poem is a series of little stitches. The stitches were my addition, and I worked with the book designer to get it just right. I think now that REDWORK was doing its work on me long before I knew it. I just had to get older. I had to stop. I had to breathe. I had to take it one stitch at a time.
Rumpus: I’m curious about the tension and relationship between both the embroidered image and the poems, which came first in the discovery of either the embroidery or poem in your work, for example, in “Atlas for a Dead Star” or “Redwork?” Or did the stitching and poem work in tandem in creating each other at the same time?
Guerrero: It varied. “Atlas for a Dead Star” was inspired by an image I saw of an anatomical chart that named bones and organs and stuff. But it reminded me of a conversation I had with Ross Gay many years ago in grad school. We were discussing where in our body we carry anger. I began thinking about what a woman’s body carries. After I embroidered the image, I set about naming the parts of the body that carry what a woman carries: passion, fear, her mother, her father, her grandmother, childhood bullying, her children, guns.
With other images, “Redwork” for example, I wanted to depict the realities of a woman’s life that happen both outside her body and within her soul—how they live and can bloom or fester in her head. So, that image also came first. The lesson, the title poem, was what resulted. In it are images from some of the other poems in the collection: umbrella, sonogram of a baby, elephants, cotton, mesquite trees, ocean waves, cactus, rattlesnakes, a pomegranate, La Virgen de Guadalupe, a gun.
My favorite, the biggest, which is about 3 feet by 4 feet, and which took the longest and was the last one to make, is “Quantum Entanglement: An Anatomical Essay.” I wrote its sister piece, “Quantum Entanglement: An Artist’s Statement” while I worked on it. It’s a woman’s body, but if you look closely, it’s a map of the Southside of San Antonio, which is to say, a map to and from my ancestors.
Rumpus: Repetition appears throughout the book, almost like recurring stitches. How did you think about repetition as both a poetic device and an echo of embroidery?
Guerrero: Repetition, anaphora, that retrospective patterning, enacts the routine of daily life. To call back to an image, a phrase, a word, I think, hammers home the need to re-see, revise, shift perspective. With each layered repetition, what a word/idea means is shifted, deepened—broken open, even.
So many know well hard and tedious work, the sad routine of dismissal, the monotony of repetitive movement—at work, at home—just to stay out of scrutiny, out of the red, keep children fed. At some point, there has to be a re-imagining of the goal. The ability to re-see the why can reinvigorate and revalorize the work itself. It becomes necessary. It becomes something to honor in each other and within oneself—a dedication no one taught you. The shifting of perspective can turn monotony into revelation and beauty. A recognition of power and strength and loyalty.
Rumpus: For this collection of poetry, you traveled to China, France, and Mexico for research. In sections IV and V, some of these poems are about these travels; what was surprising to you during your travels and research and how did it influence you to push either form or craft for this collection?
Guerrero: After feeling the need to work within the limited space of the sonnet, for example, to employ the confinement of form, I let the research aspect of this work free me. What I discovered in my travels were histories so different and yet so similar to my own. I chose to set aside the logic and to let myself feel with the spirit of the women who came before me. It was a practice in complete vulnerability—which was not a safe place to be in this climate. But I had no choice. The work required that of me, and perhaps that’s why it took so long to complete. I was fighting with myself. I had to give up the fight, let myself be the mended thing.
This allowed me to think bigger in terms of what a poetry book could look like—and not just poetry, but lyric essays, and visual poems. There were no rules this time. I had made no time constraints on myself. I didn’t know what I was looking for in terms of research, and I didn’t know what the book was trying to say. I was gathering, learning. The work in the book looks different than anything I’ve ever done, and it feels different. This makes it scary, but sometimes scary is necessary.
Your collection features poems with the physics theory, Quantum Entanglement. I’m fascinated by the relationship of the speakers of the poems with how they perceive distance, time, objects, and events with these theories. How did needlework help to create and weave these theories with the events the speaker tells?
Guerrero: Returning to a craft done for generations around the world seemed to me like going back to basics. The women I met as we sat embroidering together with our different languages and cultures—we were in communion.
But what I discovered was that there must have been a kind of knowing that women held in their bodies—something of patience and sacredness and ability. Fabric and thread got me as close to the knowing without having the ability to call up the women I loved who’ve been gone from the earth for so long. I had been thinking about Quantum Entanglement for years (I love science documentaries), and while embroidering, I suddenly felt the jolt of my own history come through my body. We were like entangled particles. And it wasn’t just that their handiwork was affecting my life, but their passion, their struggles, their resilience. The embroidery, and the process of it, the knowing, became an artifact of this history.
If two particles that had once been linked to one another, then separated by time and/or space could still be affected by the other’s experience, seemed to me the greatest explanation of what I was thinking about regarding my own foremothers. It wasn’t just the same injustices my people had experienced that I was thinking through. The needlework, work done with my hands, confirmed the unspoken reality of people I knew well and watched struggle: to work, during times of celebration or in times of turmoil, was the constant. A difficult, but certain, way of moving forward. The repetitive motion of keeping on.
Rumpus: The “Technique” poems puncture the collection much like stitches in embroidery as the poems move between the personal, the instructional, and the poetic. How did you come about this connectivity?
Guerrero: The technique poems are placed throughout the manuscript as a reminder (to myself) to keep the main thing the main thing. It became important to pull myself out of the daily grind to see the bigger picture, to connect the generations before me to the generation after. It was also a revelation of how each individual person uses what they know to keep moving forward. I corralled them into little poems, but the individuality of each person’s (or in some cases, my observation of a culture’s) technique was wholly their own. There is something powerful in this: the documentation of the separate times and places of each, all working with the same tools toward healing.
Rumpus: The collection explores women’s labor both inside and outside the home. What does the embroidery reveal about the invisible work women have historically performed?
Guerrero: It’s not invisible. Everyone sees and benefits from the work. But most people don’t acknowledge the women doing the work. There’s a difference. And not just women, men, too. So how we define it, what we name it, whether or not we celebrate it, can either change or perpetuate that.
It was very important to me to show the backs of the embroidered pieces for this reason. Though the fronts provide delicate and carefully planned images, one might call the back chaotic. However, what the back reveals is the real-life shifting, lengthening, combining, knotting, securing, of what gets presented. Like looking at the inside of your body—there’s an intricate system there, too, that we don’t see, and it’s amazing. I wanna see it. I wanna acknowledge and celebrate that work.
Rumpus: Although “The Glossary of Stitches” serves as a literal glossary, it also reads like a series of poetic meditations. What does this suggest about the relationship between the poetic craft and the visual art?
Guerrero: The strongest poetry is image-rich and vivid. I enjoy exploring the fibers of something until I can describe it just right. In that way, I see poetry itself as a visual art. They’ve always been working in tandem for me. I realize now I have always worked on both simultaneously, but this time, to place the visual art together with the text felt important to the histories I was exploring.
When writing the glossary (which most embroidery how-to books contain), I was especially excited to join poetry to each individual stitch. It was here that it all came together for me: unwritten into the tediousness of embroidery were the subtle hardships and revelations women understood. I needed to write them down. In doing so, I knew that the stitches used in the bigger embroidered pieces needed to be labeled with the stitches used for that piece. Again, repetition plays a big part here: When I wrote the glossary, I understood that I knew things I didn’t know I knew. It served as confirmation of that “Quantum Entanglement.”
Rumpus: Which poem or embroidered piece surprised you the most while creating this collection, and what did it teach you about yourself as both poet and artist?
Guerrero: “Quantum Entanglement”—it required a lot of patience (what many like to tell me I don’t have a lot of). But what others may see as impatience is really urgency. Women feel urgency—to get the job, to fight, to finish school… and to others it may read as impatience. But for generations, women have seen firsthand how slow things move. We are not unrealistic in the fights we claim; they require patience. That does not mean they are not urgent.
The version of this piece in the book was the second version. The first was too small. I needed it to be bigger. I had already spent a year working on the first version, then I spent a year and a half making the other. I think my need for a bigger piece, I know this now that it’s done, was parallel to being ready to speak up, speak louder.
