Emmy Pérez, USA fellow 2022 and Texas Poet Laureate 2020, is the author of the poetry collections With the River on Our Face and Solstice. A collection of her new and selected poetry is forthcoming from TCU Press.
Pérez is a recipient of a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets and poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, CantoMundo, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has also received the Modesta Avila Award, the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award, and the James D. Phelan Award.
Her work appears in anthologies such as Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology (University of Georgia Press), Other Musics: New Latina Poetry (University of Oklahoma Press), A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (University of Iowa Press), The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press), among others. Her poetry also appears on the Poetry Foundation online, Split this Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, and the Poem-A-Day series with the Academy of American Poets.
Pérez is a graduate of Columbia University (MFA) and the University of Southern California (BA). She has taught in Texas borderland institutions since the year 2000. Over the years, she has also led community-based creative writing projects and taught poetry writing in juvenile and adult detention centers. Since 2008, she has been a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop for socially engaged writers, and in 2020 she was named a member of the Texas Institute for Letters. In 2021, she served as Consulting Artist-in-Residence with UT San Antonio’s Democratizing Racial Justice Project as a subawardee of their Mellon Foundation grant.
She is a full professor of creative writing at UTRGV and teaches MFA and undergraduate creative writing courses. In 2016, she was awarded a Faculty Excellence Award in Student Mentoring, and in 2012, a UT Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award. She is an affiliate faculty member in Mexican American Studies and holds the Dr. Robert S. Nelsen Professorship in Mexican American Studies, 2021-2024. She also serves as Chair of the Department of Creative Writing.
Photo Credit: Paul Chouy
Curriculum Vitae
Professor
Creative Writing
Email:
emmy.perez@utrgv.edu ELABS 206
Phone: (956) 665-3435
