Emma Trelles is the daughter of Cuban immigrants and 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, and others

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 inaugural O, Miami Poetry Festival, the Miami Book Fair, the Ojai Art Center, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the Palabra Pura series at the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago. 

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