Emmy Pérez is the author of Solstice. Originally from Santa Ana, California, she is a graduate of the University of Southern California and Columbia University. A member of the inaugural cohort of CantoMundo fellows, she is also a member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop for socially engaged writers. In 2009, she was the recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award. Previously, she was the recipient of the James D. Phelan Award and poetry fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Over the years, she has facilitated writing workshops in juvenile and adult detention centers in New Mexico and Texas. Currently, she is an associate professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where she teaches in the MFA in creative writing and Mexican American Studies programs. She has lived on the Texas-Mexico border, from El Paso to the Rio Grande Valley, since the new millennium.