About \ Bio

Emily Wallis Hughes is a poet and editor who grew up in Agua Caliente, California, a small town in the Sonoma Valley. Her second book of poems, my friend Now, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil in March 2027. Sugar Factory, her first full-length book of poems, containing a series of twelve new paintings by Sarah Riggs in collaboration with Emily’s poetry, was published in January 2019 by Spuyten Duyvil. Sugar Factory was a finalist for both the Fence Modern Poets Series Prize and the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize. Her poems have been published in Always Crashing, American Poetry Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Blazing Stadium, Cordella, Conduit, Elderly, Gigantic Magazine, Luna Luna, Painted Bride Quarterly, Prelude, Suisun Valley Review, Trampoline, A Women’s Thing, ZAUM, and many other literary journals.

Hughes was awarded a New York State Council on the Arts individual artist grant for 2026.

At Fence Magazine, Inc., a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit, independent literary publisher, Hughes is Editorial Director and Fence Books Editor.

Emily earned a BA in English Literature in 2008, and an MA in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of California, Davis in 2010. After living in Berkeley while working as head swim coach at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, she taught English composition and literature at two community colleges: American River College and Cosumnes River College in Sacramento, California until 2014, when she moved to New York. She earned her MFA in Poetry at New York University, where she was a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow, working for the Teachers and Writers Collaborative in partnership with the NYU Creative Writing Program. Emily has been teaching undergraduate creative writing courses at Rutgers–New Brunswick since 2016 as a Lecturer, where she has advised honors poetry thesis students. In addition to Rutgers, she has taught creative writing classes and poetry workshops at New York University, the University of California, Davis, and with Brooklyn Poets. She lives in Astoria, New York.

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Emily enjoys giving readings in both traditional and exploratory formats, indoors and outdoors. She has been a featured poet at The Astoria Bookshop, Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop, Penn Book Center, Unnameable Books, Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, John Natsoulas Gallery, Readers’ Books, Rutgers New Brunswick Writers’ House, Sacramento Poetry Center, KDVS 90.3, and other places that welcome and support poets of all kinds, including redwood forests.