[8][2] He has written extensively about growing up in New Jersey in the 1970s as a member of a large, multiracial, adoptive family, most particularly in the memoir, Skinfolk, published in 2023 and named a "Best of 2023" by Kirkus Reviews.
That book is a narrative of the shifting racial classifications in New York City, as witnessed by the African American civil rights leader W.E.B.
Du Bois, the Irish American nationalist Daniel Cohalan, the Nordic supremacist and armchair racial scientist Madison Grant, and the mixed-race novelist Jean Toomer.
American Mediterranean received honorable mention in the competition for the 2009 Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award, given by the Caribbean Studies Association.
[15] A third book, Seeing Race in Modern America, was published in the Fall of 2013 by the University of North Carolina Press, and considers the history of racial sight over the past two hundred years.
His biography of the famous African American singer and performer, Josephine Baker, published in 2014 by Harvard University Press, focuses on her multiracial, transnational, adopted family in France and the historical contexts of decolonization, civil and human rights, liberalism and utopianism.
Guterl was the 2010 winner of the Mary Turpie Prize for Distinguished Teaching, Advising, and Program Development, from the American Studies Association.