The Artist Behind The Work
As a BIPOC veteran, poet, photographer and advocate, I believe in the transformative power of education to bridge communities, elevate marginalized voices, and inspire social change. My writing explores themes of resilience, cultural identity, and healing, drawing from my experiences in the U.S. Navy and my deep connection to the Front
Range communities.
I hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University (2024) with a focus on poetry, where I explored the intersection of Erasure Poetry, Epigenetics, Supreme Court Decisions, and Mystical Realism.
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Enrique Gautier is a poet, educator, veteran, and interdisciplinary writer whose work examines how institutional language shapes identity, power, and survival. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a Juris Doctor and is a veteran of the United States Navy. His writing emerges from lived experience at the intersections of war, law, migration, race, disability, and ecology, and is deeply informed by his background in legal training, military service, and community-based teaching.
Gautier's creative practice centers on documentary, erasure, and formally experimental poetics. He frequently engages civic and legal texts, including military oaths, court decisions, bureaucratic records, and environmental language, treating them not as abstractions but as human artifacts that carry emotional, ethical, and historical weight. Through techniques such as blackout, acrostic architecture, constrained form, and intentional white space, his work exposes how harm is embedded, normalized, and often concealed within official language. Rage, exhaustion, and silence function in his poems not as aesthetic gestures but as structural realities shaped by systems of power.
Much of his writing explores the afterlives of institutional violence, including military bureaucracy, immigration enforcement, extractive economies, and the uneven distribution of care and recognition. His poems often situate the body as a site of record, bearing the imprint of policies, wars, and environmental damage long after their formal justifications have faded. Across his work, Gautier is interested in complicity as a condition rather than a moral failing, and in accountability without absolution.
His poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in Acentos Review, The War Horse, Collateral Journal, Bombay Gin, and several anthologies. His work has been supported by fellowships and awards from Lighthouse Writers Workshop and Lit Fest, among others. He has presented and taught in academic, community, and veteran-centered spaces, including as a guest academic lecturer at the United States Air Force Academy. He has been invited to deliver a TEDx talk at the University of Essex on erasure poetry as liberation, exploring how constraint-based poetic forms can function as acts of resistance and reclamation. His visual art, particularly photography engaging themes of landscape, memory, and institutional presence, has been exhibited at the Colorado Photographic Art Center, Aurora City Hall, and Lakewood Public Library.
Gautier is an Assistant Professor of English at Red Rocks Community College, where he teaches composition, literature, and creative writing. He also serves as adjunct faculty at Naropa University and teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. He works extensively with veterans and community writers, emphasizing creative practice as a tool for agency, reflection, and critical engagement. His pedagogy is rooted in accessibility, ethical listening, and the belief that writing can function as both witness and intervention. He is particularly committed to supporting writers whose voices have been marginalized by institutional, linguistic, or cultural barriers.
Born in Venezuela and raised in the United States, Gautier lives and works in Colorado. He continues to write across genres, develop interdisciplinary projects that bridge poetry and public life, and pursue work that resists simplification while remaining grounded in lived reality.
Awards & Recognitions
2025 Lit Fest Veterans Writing Award, Lighthouse Writers Workshop
"With formal dexterity and linguistic vigor, the author mashes together images of the world with the imprint that experience leaves on both body and mind. The writing feels chaotic, intentionally so, but harnesses a controlled momentum that forces the reader to sit still and reckon with the irreconcilable. This is writing to which I will return." - Benjamin Hertwig
Best in Show: Eastern Colorado VA Creative Art Festival (2024-2025)
First Place Awards: Poetry and Essay Categories, Eastern Colorado VA Creative Art Festival (2023-2025)