Honoring Our Hispanic Heritage
Meet Georgina Marie Guardado: Lake County’s Literacy Program Coordinator and Former Multi-Term Poet Laureate!
Lake County Celebrates Inspiring Trailblazer
County of Lake celebrates the start of Hispanic Heritage Month with a special feature highlighting Lake County Poet Laureate Emerita Georgina Marie Guardado.
Hispanic Heritage Month, from September 15 to October 15, features the 2024 theme "Pioneers of Change: Shaping the Future Together," exemplified by Georgina Marie Guardado. A Lakeport-born Mexican American of Mojave descent, Guardado is committed to fostering diversity and inclusivity in Lake County's literary community.
Guardado, writing from the lands of the Eastern and Northern Pomo peoples, made history as Lake County's first Mexican American, Hispanic American female, and youngest Poet Laureate, serving two consecutive terms from 2020 to 2024. Appointed by the Board of Supervisors since 1998, she is the 11th laureate and the first to serve multiple terms. Her tenure highlights her dedication to promoting poetry and literacy.
In 2021, Guardado received the prestigious Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, joining 22 others nationwide. The fellowship honors exceptional poets and supports their community-based poetry programs. Her civic proposal aimed to engage diverse community members and make poetry more accessible to all. Despite the pandemic, Guardado adapted, offering virtual events and readings.
Guardado's poetry, known for its heartfelt authenticity, explores themes of grief, generational trauma, nature, longing, and self-discovery. Her work, including some poems from her chapbooks, "Finding the Roots of Water" (2018) and "Trees Speak" (2019), have been featured in publications like The Bloom, Poets.org, and Gulf Coast Journal. Her accolades include the Kwame Dawes Mapmakers and MFA Merit endowments (2023), the Anne G. Locascio Scholarship (2020), and the Poets Laureate Fellowship (2021).
Guardado is the Literacy Program Coordinator for the Lake County Library, leads the Lake County Poet Laureate Facebook Group, and is President of the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference Board. As a scholar at Pacific University's MFA in Writing program, she is crafting her manuscript, "The Length of Trauma Covets."
An animal lover, Guardado has fostered numerous pets and currently resides with her rescue dogs, Sophie and Micco.
County of Lake celebrates Guardado as a role model dedicated to creating a more diverse, inclusive, and unified community through the transformative power of poetry.