Emmy Pérez, Texas Poet Laureate 2020, is the author of the poetry collections With the River on Our Face (University of Arizona Press) and Solstice (Swan Scythe Press). A collection of her new and selected poetry is forthcoming from TCU Press.
Pérez is the recipient of a 2020 Poets Laureate Fellowship with the Academy of American Poets and previous poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, CantoMundo, New York Foundation for the Arts, 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), and many others.
Pérez is a graduate of Columbia University (MFA) and the University of Southern California (BA). For the past 20 years, she has taught in Texas borderlands institutions, and since 2008 has been a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop for socially engaged writers. Over the years, she has also led community-based creative writing projects and taught poetry writing in juvenile and adult detention centers.
Currently, she is 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 also serves as Associate Director for the Center for Mexican American Studies and is an affiliate faculty member in Mexican American Studies.
Curriculum Vitae
Professor
Creative Writing
Email:
emmy.perez@utrgv.edu ELABS 206
Phone: (956) 665-3435
