Emily Pérez grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. She earned a BA at Stanford University and an MFA from the University of Houston where she worked as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast and a writer-in-residence with Writers in the Schools. She has been awarded scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, and she recently joined the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. She writes reviews for the Latino Poetry Review, and her poems have appeared in Borderlands, Third Coast, The Laurel Review, Ocho, Nimrod, DIAGRAM and other journals. She teaches high school in Seattle, Washington, where she lives with her husband and son.