Professor Gutiérrez-Coto joined the Foreign Languages & Literatures faculty in August 2015 and, since August 2018, serves on the Africana Studies’ Advisory Board. His teaching and research interests are primarily focused on Caribbean studies, particularly in Africana Diaspora.
He also has authored three scholarly monographs, including a literary history (About the Blacknessand Africanness in the Literary Language of Motivos de Son by Nicolás Guillén, 2002), and seven edited volumes, including a critical edition (Complete Poems by Ambrosio Echemendía, 2019). His Africana Diaspora’s research is centered on Afro-Cuban Poetry 19th to 20th Century. Nicolás Guillén is the protagonist of Vanguard poetry movement in the 1930s and is currently Cuba’s National Poet. Ambrosio Echemendía was a slave in the 19th Century who is an essential author in late Romanticism in the Caribbean. Professor Gutiérrez-Coto’s first completed edition on Echemendía’s poetry includes a panoramic of Cuban Afro-descendant Poetry from the 18th and 19th Centuries. As a poet, the most recent of Prof. Gutiérrez-Coto’s three books of poetry is A las puertas de Esmirna (2017).
His scholarly articles appear in several journals, including Cuban Studies, Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba, Camino Real: Revista de estudios norteamericanos, and Celestinesca. In 2008, he won the National Prize of Essay “José María Heredia,” awarded by the Cuban Union of Writers and Artists. Among this and other distinctions, he has received two grants from Spain’s Ministry of Culture (2010, 2015).
Since 2015, Dr. Gutiérrez-Coto serves as editor in chief of the peer-reviewed journal Caribe, revista de cultura y literatura (Founded at the University of Hawaii in 1976). Additionally, he is an editorial board member of Chasqui, revista de literatura latinoamericana (Arizona State University), of Transatlántica: Poetry and Scholarship (Case Western Reserve University), and of Ibero-American Literary Society (Newark, DE).
His two primary works focusing on the African Diaspora are:
Acerca de lo negro y la africanía en la lengua literaria de Motivos de son de Nicolás Guillén. [About the Blackness and Africanness in the Literary Language of Motivos de Son by Nicolás Guillén] Pinar del Río: Ediciones Vitral, 2002. Partially Reprinted in: Motivaciones: Lecturas sobre Motivos de Son. Edited by Denia García Ronda. Ciudad de La Habana: Editorial José Martí, 2008: 359-365.
Ambrosio Echemendía: Poesía completa. [Ambrosio Echemendía: Complete Poems]. Edited, introductory study, and appendixes by Amauri Gutiérrez-Coto. Leiden: Almenara, 2019.