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Poet To Open MFA Reading Series With Book Release

Sept. 28, 2016
SHSU Media Contact: Jennifer Gauntt

The Sam Houston State University Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing, editing and publishing–in collaboration with the College of Humanities & Social Sciences, the Department of Foreign Languages and SH ELITE–will host a craft talk and poetry reading with visiting writer Emmy Pérez on the official release day of her book “With the River on Our Face,” on Tuesday (Oct. 4).

Emmy Pérez (above) is the author of “With the River on Our Face” (below), which she will read from and discuss during two events on the SHSU campus on Oct. 4.

Pérez, a multi-genre writer and teacher, will read at 5 p.m. in Austin Hall to kick off the MFA program’s annual reading series. The reading is free and open to the public.

Additionally, Pérez will give a craft talk on the process and research of writing her book at 11 a.m. in Evans Complex Room 212.

“With the River on Our Face” celebrates the land, communities and ecology of the borderlands through lyric and narrative utterances, auditory and visual texture, chant, and litany that merge and diverge like the iconic river in the collection.

Of Pérez’s book, National Medal of Arts winner Sandra Cisneros has written, “In divided times, Emmy Pérez's voice speaks not only from America, but from the Americas, north and south. A wise, healing poetry.”

In addition to creative work, Pérez is a gifted teacher, recently winning the 2016 University Excellence Award for Student Mentoring from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where she currently teaches as an associate professor of creative writing and interim director for the Center for Mexican American Studies. Through service-learning projects, Pérez has collaborated with her students to serve as creative writing mentors at juvenile and community centers, helping them improve their own writing in the process.

“Writing well is a powerful skill,” Pérez said in a previous interview. "Those who write well will have access to more opportunities in life. It is also a skill that can help in the pursuit of social justice."

Pérez is originally from Santa Ana, California, and has lived on the Texas-Mexico border, from El Paso to the Rio Grande Valley, since 2000.

She also is the author of “Solstice” (Swan Scythe Press) and has received poetry fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center, the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

A member of the inaugural cohort of CantoMundo poetry fellows from 2010-2012, she has since 2008 been a member of the Macondo Writers' Workshop, founded by Sandra Cisneros for socially engaged writers. She has also received the James D. Phelan Award for her prose writing.

Pérez earned her MFA from Columbia University and her bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California.

Pérez’s poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas, Pilgrimage Magazine, PALABRA: A Magazine of Chicano & Latino Literary Art, and many other publications, including the anthologies Entre Guadalupe y Malinche: Tejanas in Literature & Art (University of Texas Press 2016), New Border Voices: An Anthology (Texas A&M Press 2014), and The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press 2007).

She has poetry and lyric essays forthcoming in the anthologies Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology (University of Georgia Press), A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (University of Iowa Press 2011), and IMANIMAN: Poets Reflect on Transformative & Transgressive Borders in Gloria Anzaldúa's Work (Aunt Lute Books, forthcoming).

The MFA reading series will continue on Oct. 24, at 5 p.m., in Austin Hall, with Peter Roussel, the SHSU Philip G. Warner Endowed Chair and author of “Ruffled Flourishes;” on Oct. 27, at 5:30 p.m., in Evans Building Room 105, with Debra Monroe, author of “My Unsentimental Education;” and on Nov. 7, at 5 p.m., in Austin Hall, with Olivia Clare, poet and fiction writer, and newly appointed assistant professor of creative writing at SHSU.

For more information about the reading series or the creative writing program at SHSU, contact Scott Kaukonen, director of the MFA program, at kaukonen@shsu.edu or 936.294.1407.

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