Emmy Pérez
Photo: Paul Chouy
Emmy Pérez, Texas Poet Laureate 2020, has lived in the Texas borderlands for 24 years and is originally from Santa Ana, California. She is a graduate of Columbia University (MFA) and the University of Southern California (BA). Pérez is currently a full professor of creative writing at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV)–formerly University of Texas-Pan American–where she also serves as department chair, teaches in the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs, and holds the Dr. Robert S. Nelsen Endowed Professorship in Mexican American Studies (2021-2024). For five years, Pérez held various administrative positions—interim director, associate director, and acting director—with UTRGV's Center for Mexican American Studies (B3 Institute), and she is an affiliate faculty member of the Mexican American Studies academic program. Over the years, she has also served as a creative-writing workshop facilitator in community-based programs and adult and juvenile detention centers; she has taught writing at three border region HSI institutions, beginning at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and El Paso Community College.
Pérez is the author of the poetry collections With the River on Our Face (University of Arizona Press, 2016) and Solstice (Swan Scythe Press, 2003, 2011, 2019). Her latest collection, Paper america: New and Selected Poems (TCU Press, 2025) is forthcoming. Her poetry has also been published with the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series and Split this Rock's The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, and appeared in journals such as Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Indiana Review, and Pilgrimage Magazine; and anthologies such as Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology (University of Georgia Press), Other Musics: New Latina Poetry (University of Oklahoma Press), Orange County: A Literary Field Guide (Heyday), What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy & Outrage (Northwestern U. Press), The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press), and A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (University of Iowa Press).
Pérez is the recipient of a 2022 United States Artist Fellowship, a 2020 Poets Laureate Fellowship with the Academy of American Poets while serving as Texas Poet Laureate 2020. Other honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown; the inaugural Modesta Avila Award from LibroMobile in her hometown Santa Ana, the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award; and residencies at MacDowell, the Ucross Foundation, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Since 2008, she has been a member of the Macondo Writers' Workshop for socially engaged writers and was part of the inaugural cohort of CantoMundo fellows in 2010. In El Paso, she was a member of the Women Writers' Collective and, in 2017, co-founded Poets Against Walls writing collective in the Rio Grande Valley. She also served as the 2021 Consulting Artist-in-Residence with UT San Antonio's Democratizing Racial Justice Mellon Foundation grant in collaboration with the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center.
