Marisa Urrutia Gedney

2016 Alumna

Cottage: Owl

BIO: Marisa Urrutia Gedney (she/her) named one of Forbes Magazine's top 30 under 30 in Education, 2012, spent a 14 year career using writing in the classroom as a social justice practice for identity work and strived to make college access more equitable. She directed and published a series of Ethnic Studies books that tell overlooked histories written by students in Boyle Heights. 

As a Sahumadora in Danza Azteca, she practices fire as her spirit technology and transmutes grief and transgenerational trauma in her poetry. Her first poetry collection, Altar of the Imagination, is available from Finishing Line Press.  She was invited by former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera to read at the Los Angeles Library series, ALOUD, and has received a Writers in Residence at Hedgebrook, studied at the Postgraduate Writers’ Conference at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Voices of Our Nation, and Las Dos Brujas. 

As Co-Founder of, Your Truth at Work, a WOC-led DEI consulting agency, she helps organizations and individuals unlearn and dismantle oppressive workplace norms to create a more equitable future for the modern workplace.

Experiencing significant loss from an early age, she dedicates her life to normalizing the grief experience and volunteered with the COVID Grief Network providing 1-1 and small group grief support.