(No, not that Emma Perez)
El Paso poeta/writer/professor Emmy Perez is the author of Solstice, published by SwanScythe Press. Currently, she is Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at the University of Texas-Pan American
Emmy Pérez grew up in Santa Ana, California. After graduating from Columbia University’s M.F.A. program, she received poetry fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, New York Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, and other publications.
In Spring & Summer 2006, she taught poetry in a juvenile detention center in El Paso as part of The Spoken & Written Word Poetry Project for underserved young adults that she founded and directs with the literary organization BorderSenses. From 2000-2005, she taught writing at the University of Texas at El Paso, most recently as Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the West Texas Writing Project Summer Institute 2005.
As a member of the Women Writers’ Collective of El Paso, she has also helped organize readings that feature women writers to help raise awareness about issues related to women in the border community and beyond. She has taught writing to adult education students, women prison inmates, and college students. She has also facilitated writing instruction for adult education classes near the Navajo and Zuni reservations and for women prison inmates from Montana and Oregon at the McKinley County detention center in New Mexico. Emmy lives in El Paso’s Lower Valley.