"The new generation of Latina poets will be noted for the work of writers such as Emmy Pérez. Her poems are houses of light, reminding us that family and culture survive the political realities and darkness of our time."
--The Bloomsbury Review
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EMMY PÉREZ is the author of SOLSTICE (Swan Scythe Press, 2003). A former New York Foundation for the Arts and Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown poetry fellow, her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, LUNA, Notre Dame Review, New York Quarterly, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Laurel Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Karavan, and other publications, including The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2007) and The Weight of Addition (Mutabilis Press 2007). Her work is also forthcoming in an Achiote Seeds anthology in spring 2008.
Originally from Santa Ana, California, she's a graduate of Columbia University's MFA program and the University of Southern California.
Her fiction has appeared in STORY and Blue Mesa Review. She received the James D. Phelan Award "For her stories which are imbued with surprising imagery, vivid and telling detail, compassion and imagination, all in the service of tough-minded content and the nuances of character and feeling."
From 2000-2005, she taught writing at the University of Texas at El Paso, most recently as Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing (2004-2005) and Director of the West Texas Writing Project Summer Institute (2005). She has also taught writing at El Paso Community College.
Before moving to the U.S./Mexico border, she worked in an adult basic education program serving the Navajo and Zuni reservations in Gallup, NM, and she also provided writing instruction and GED preparation for women prison inmates from Montana and Oregon housed in a county detention facility.
From 2005-2006, she founded and directed The Spoken & Written Word Poetry Project with the literary organization BorderSenses. She taught incarcerated and underserved young adults in El Paso, and the project has since evolved into Voices Behind Walls in New Mexico, directed by Lecroy Rhyanes.
She has participated in readings with Danish PEN in Copenhagen, at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, New Mexico State University, St. Mary's College / The Michiana Poetry Festival, and several local venues. She has also taught community-based writing workshops for the Border Book Festival, the Tumblewords project, the Women Writers' Collective, and in local libraries and community centers.
She has been a poet-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
As a member of the Women Writers' Collective of El Paso, she has helped organize readings and events to raise awareness about issues related to women in the border community and beyond.
Currently, she is Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at the University of Texas-Pan American in South Texas, where she teaches in the new M.F.A. program. She also teaches poetry, with her students, in local detention centers as part of a service learning project she began in Fall 2007.
Voices Behind Walls
"Solstice" poem online
"Emmy Pérez's poems are elegantly political, never polemical. They discover the beauty in revolution without romanticizing its hardships. From the first moment I encountered her poems, I knew I was meeting a singular voice--one that can find lyricism in struggle, dignity in injustice. Her voice sings of landscape and longing with deftness of image and diction. What a welcome debut."
--Allison Joseph
"Emmy Pérez places her poems in an American landscape that is both cruel and forgiving. This is beautiful work where the poet both loses and finds herself in a self-examination that is honest and true."
--Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Emmy Pérez
eperez@bordersenses.com