Opened
“We bisect midnight, listening to Oppen. / Refusing to be numerous is to be frozen.”
Elizabeth Pérez
Elizabeth Pérez is a Cuban American writer and associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Pérez was a finalist for the inaugural (2024) Wesleyan University Press Cardinal Poetry Prize. In 2025, she was named as a finalist for Gunpowder Press’s Alta California Chapbook Prize, Palette Poetry’s Nature Poetry Prize, and the Black Warrior Review Fiction Contest. In 2026, she received an honorable mention in Green Linden Press’s Wishing Jewel Prize for poetic innovation and her poem “Independence Night” won the River Heron Editors’ Prize. A 2025 VONA and 2026 McCormack Writing Center (formerly Tin House) Winter Workshop alum, she has published poetry in two anthologies and several journals. Pérez is also the author of two award-winning books on Afro-Caribbean religions: _Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions_ (NYU Press, 2016) and _The Gut: A Black Atlantic Alimentary Tract_ (Cambridge University Press, 2023).