Whatever Dimness or Brightness

Rae Gouirand is the author of nine works of poetry and nonfiction, including Open Winter (2011), Glass is Glass Water is Water (2018), The History of Art (2019), and the book-length poem The Velvet Book (Cornerstone Press 2024), a 2025 Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her verse and prose have appeared in American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bennington Review, Conjunctions, Foglifter, The Iowa Review, jubilat, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Spinning Jenny, Under a Warm Green Linden, ZYZZYVA, two volumes of the Best New Poets series, Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology, and many other journals and anthologies nationwide. A leader in community-based education for writers for more than twenty years, she leads the online cross-genre writing group Scribe Lab and serves as a Continuing Lecturer in the Department of English at UC-Davis.