Emmy Pérez

Emmy Pérez is a graduate of the University of Southern California and Columbia University.

Pérez is the author of Solstice (Swan Scythe Press, 2019) and With the River on Our Face (University of Arizona Press, 2016). A collection of her new and selected poems is forthcoming from TCU Press. She is also the coeditor, with Nancy Reddy, of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood (University of Georgia Press, 2022).

Pérez is a recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, CantoMundo, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has also received a United States Artists Fellowship, the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation Award, the Modesta Avila Award, and the James D. Phelan Award.

A member of the Macondo Writers Workshop for socially engaged writers, Pérez cofounded the Poets Against Walls collective in 2017. She is a professor of creative writing and associate director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. In 2019, she was named the poet laureate of Texas.

Read about Emmy Pérez’s 2020 Poets Laureate Fellowship project.