The Himalayan Literature Festival and Writers Workshop in Kathmandu will soon welcome a poet whose voice carries both the echoes of the Sierra Foothills and the ancestral tides of the Azores. Lara Gularte, Poet Laureate Emerita of El Dorado County, California, will bring her luminous presence and layered verse to this gathering of international writers.

Author of the acclaimed Fourth World Woman (Finishing Line Press) and Kissing the Bee (The Bitter Oleander Press), Gularte explores with rare poignancy the history of her Portuguese pioneer ancestors who journeyed from the Azores to Northern California in the late 1800s. Literary critic Vamberto Freitas of the University of the Azores praised her work as “poetry testifying to our perpetual search for self,” situating her voice in a continuum of exile, belonging, and reinvention.

Her poetry, nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes, appears in journals and anthologies both national and international. Deeply rooted in the community, she is affiliated with the Cagarro Colloquium: Azorean Diaspora Writers at the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (California State University, Fresno) and has participated in numerous readings at PBBI-Fresno State. Beyond the page, Gularte serves as a teaching artist at Mule Creek State Prison, co-hosts library workshops across her region, and is a renowned leader of Ekphrastic writing workshops in galleries and cultural spaces. She also curates the widely celebrated monthly series Poetry of the Sierra Foothills at Chateau Davell Winery in Camino, California.

Her poetry is a bridge—across seas, across cultures, across generations. Bruma Publications is preparing to publish a new collection of her works, which will gather together her explorations of Azorean identity within California’s diverse and multicultural society.

In her poems, there is always the pulse of the islands: volcanic stone, the flight of the cagarro, the memory of migrations written into the bones of descendants. Lara Gularte gives voice to the Azorean identity that endures and thrives, even in fourth-generation Californians, reminding us that heritage is not diminished by distance, but rather renewed through language, imagination, and love. Her words carry the strength of Atlantic waves and the resilience of a people who endure—so that, in the Himalayas, her verse will rise like mist and fire, carrying the Azores into the high air of Kathmandu.