Emily Pérez
HPPR Poets on the Plains, Featured PoetEmily Pérez is the author of What Flies Want, winner of the Iowa Prize (University of Iowa Press, May 2022) and a finalist for a Colorado Book Award. With Nancy Reddy she edited The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood (UGA, 2022), also a finalist for a Colorado Book Award. Her other books and chapbooks include House of Sugar, House of Stone (Center for Literary Publishing, 2016), Made and Unmade (Madhouse Press, 2019) and Backyard Migration Route (Finishing Line Press, 2011). She graduated with honors from Stanford University and earned an MFA at the University of Houston, where she served as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast and taught with Writers in the Schools. A CantoMundo fellow and Ledbury Critic, she has received grants and scholarships from Hedgebrook, the Community of Writers, the Washington State Artist Trust, Jack Straw Writers, Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, Summer Literary Seminars, and Inprint, Houston. Her poems and reviews have appeared in journals including Copper Nickel, Fairy Tale Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Diode, RHINO, The Guardian, LARB, The Georgia Review, and DIAGRAM. She is a high school teacher and grade level dean in Denver where she lives with her family. https://emilyperez.org/
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Hello, I’m Juan J. Morales, an assistant professor of English at Colorado College and a poet in Pueblo, Colorado, here for Poets on the Plains. Today I’m pleased to share with you a poem by Denver poet, Emily Pérez, titled I Wanted a Full Dose of Never-Mind of Not Ever. -
Hi, I’m Wayne Miller. I’m a poet who lives in Denver, Colorado, and I’m here for Poets on the Plains. Today I’m going to read a poem by the poet Emily Pérez. Pérez grew up in Weslaco, Texas, just a few miles north of the US-Mexico border. She studied at Stanford and the University of Houston before settling in Denver, where she works as a high school teacher and grade-level dean and lives with her husband and their two boys.
