Enrique Rodriguez Gautier is a poet, essayist, educator, and visual artist whose work explores the intersections of law, trauma, memory, and reclamation through erasure poetry and hybrid literary forms. A disabled U.S. Navy veteran and formerly undocumented immigrant, Enrique’s creative practice is rooted in the belief that language can both wound and liberate — and that erasure is a powerful method for rewriting the narratives that shape our personal and collective lives.
Enrique’s writing has been featured in The War Horse (republished by Military.com), Bombay Gin, The Acentos Review, Collateral Journal, and multiple anthologies including All of Our Lives We Ever Lived and So Long: The Poet Warrior Anthology. He is the 2025 Lighthouse Writers Workshop Veteran Writing Fellow and the winner of the Lit Fest Veteran Writing Award, recognized for his formal innovation, embodied poetics, and ability to transform legal and political documents into spaces of resistance and renewal.
His current full-length manuscript, Libert(y)-n-Re(Sol)ution, erases nine U.S. Supreme Court decisions and the U.S. military oath of enlistment, revealing hidden narratives of power, identity, and survival. He is also the author of a chapbook exploring rage, epigenetics, and mythic symbolism; a speculative fiction novel (Petahorned); a historical fiction novel; and a memoir, Paws Through Time: A Life Measured in Noses/Tailwags, which examines grief, healing, and the relationship between humans and animals.
A dedicated educator, Enrique serves as an Assistant Professor of English at Red Rocks Community College, where he has developed a trauma-informed, anti-colonial pedagogy centered on reclamation through erasure poetry. He teaches across multiple institutions, including Lighthouse Writers Workshop, Naropa University, and community-based programs throughout Colorado. He leads creative writing workshops for veterans at VFW Post 1 and facilitates narrative-healing programs for incarcerated writers. His work in these spaces centers on agency, embodiment, and the radical belief that every person has a story worth reshaping.
Enrique’s photography — which investigates themes of food-access inequality, urban geography, and the socio-political landscapes of the American West — has been exhibited at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Red Rocks Community College, the Colorado State Capitol, Aurora City Hall, and additional regional galleries. As a multidisciplinary artist, his visual work and literary work often speak to each other through motifs of erasure, fragmentation, and reconstruction.
Enrique has delivered a TEDx talk at the University of Essex on the liberatory power of erasure poetry and continues to speak on language, trauma, identity, and creative resilience. In 2025, he will teach an erasure-poetry workshop at a gallery exhibiting the work of renowned contemporary artist Gary Simmons, engaging participants in a cross-disciplinary inquiry into negative space, memory, and the politics of erasure.
He holds an MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, a JD, and a BS in Microbiology and Biotechnology. His interdisciplinary background — spanning law, biology, military service, and narrative arts — informs his deeply embodied and intellectually rigorous approach to writing and teaching.
At the center of Enrique’s work is a simple but profound belief:
we can rewrite the texts that have shaped us — and in doing so, we can rewrite ourselves.
