About \ Bio

Emily Wallis Hughes is a poet and editor who grew up in Agua Caliente, California, a small town in the Sonoma Valley. 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. Emily co-edited Slovene avant-garde poet Jure Detela’s Moss & Silver, translated by Raymond Miller with Tatjana Jamnik (Ugly Duckling Presse). Her poems have been published in Always Crashing, 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. New poems are forthcoming in the American Poetry Review.

Editorial Co-Director of Fence and Fence Books , Emily collaboratively edits and leads Fence with Jason Zuzga.

Emily earned a BA in English literature and an MA in creative writing and English literature from the University of California, Davis. After living in Berkeley while teaching swimming 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. 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 Part Time Lecturer. 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.