Emily Pérez

Emily Pérez was born and raised in south Texas. She earned a BA with honors from Stanford and MFA from the University of Houston, where she was poetry editor for Gulf Coast and a teacher for Writers in the Schools. Pérez is the author of the chapbook Backyard Migration Route (2011) and the full-length collection House of Sugar, House of Stone (2016). Both books explore what poet Sasha West has described as “liminalities” or borders. In an interview with West for Letras Latinas, Pérez noted her desire to cross and explore familiar and familial boundaries in House of Sugar, House of Stone: “I want to know about the line between the self and the partner, the self and the collective. In families we make ourselves vulnerable to unknowable others—sometimes by choice and sometimes by the accident of when, where, and to whom we were born.”

Pérez has received grants and scholarships from the Artist Trust, Jack Straw Writers, Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, Summer Literary Seminars, and Inprint, Houston. A former Canto Mundo fellow, she is a member of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. She lives and teaches in Denver, Colorado.