Rooted in Poetry: An Interview with Alameda Poet Laureate Kimi Sugioka

Georgina Marie Guardado

Georgina Marie is a poet from Lakeport, Northern California and the Lake County Poet Laureate for 2020-2024; the first Mexican-American and youngest to serve in this role for the county. In June 2021, she was selected as a Poets Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets. She is the Literary Coordinator and Poetry Out Loud Coordinator for the Lake County Arts Council, co-creator of the The Bloom's poetry column, and Poet in Residence for The Bloom. She has served as co-editor for the Middletown Art Center’s RESILIENCE and RESTORE collections of written word, funded by the California Arts Council. As part of the Broken Nose Collective, an annual chapbook exchange, she created her first poetry chapbook Finding the Roots of Water in 2018 and her second chapbook Tree Speak in 2019. In 2020, she was an Anne G. Locasio scholar for the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference and is now a member of their Board of Directors. She is currently working on her full-length poetry manuscript.