Emma Trelles is the daughter of Cuban immigrants + the author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and a finalist for Foreword-Indies poetry book of the year. She is writing a second collection of poems, Courage and the Clock. Her work is anthologized in Verse Daily; Best American Poetry; Best of the Net; Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity; To Give Life A Shape: Poems Inspired by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and others. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University and has taught poetry and creative writing workshops in academic and community based settings such as The Center for Literature and Theatre at Miami Dade College, the Sanibel Island Writers Conference, Antioch University-Santa Barbara, the Pintura Palabra project at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, and the O, Miami Poetry Festival.  (photo by Regina Reese)

Emma has presented her work at venues across the country, including The Bryant Park Reading Room in New York, The Poet and the Poem series at the Library of Congress, Busboys & Poets in Washington D.C., the Miami Book Fair, the Ojai Art Center, the Milwaukee Public Library-Central Branch, the University of California-Santa Barbara, the Last Bookstore in Los Angeles, and the Palabra Pura series at the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago. 

She is a CantoMundo Fellow and the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs. After working for many years in South Florida as an arts and culture journalist, she now lives with her husband in California, where she curates the Mission Poetry Series and teaches composition and creative writing at Santa Barbara City College. As of April 2021, she is the Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara.