Originally from Santa Ana, California, poet Emmy Pérez has lived in the Texas borderlands for the past 18+ years, reconnecting with her family history in Ysleta/El Paso and moving along the border to the Rio Grande Valley, where she has lived for the past 12 years. A graduate of Columbia University (MFA) and the University of Southern California (BA), she is the author of the poetry collections With the River on Our Face (University of Arizona Press) and Solstice (Swan Scythe Press); she is currently working on a third. Pérez is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry. In previous years, she was a recipient of poetry fellowships from CantoMundo, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MacDowell, the Ucross Foundation, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has also received the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award for her poetry and the James D. Phelan Award for her prose writing. Since 2008, she has been a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop founded by Sandra Cisneros for socially engaged writers. Pérez’s poetry has been published in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, on the … Continue reading Emmy Pérez