HOLA

My name is Christopher Rey Pérez. I was born on September 7th or 9th in the year 1987 and raised along these coordinates, 26 11'6"N 98 7'4"W, which make up part of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, a region a few miles from the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.

I am a poet working from within a matrix of opaque folklore, violence, and language in an attempt to embody the "open root" of the border. After living and working in Mexico, Palestine, and elsewhere, my poetics have come to address borders as places where writing can map global exchange.

My first "full-length" book was published in 2017. Titled gauguin's notebook, it writes through Gauguin's Tahitian journal to investigate current-day affective structures along the border vis-a-vis Gauguin's colonialist production in Tahiti. In 2023, I published my second collection. Fayuca is a book on markets and the circulation of objects, people, and desire.

Other writing includes a small chapbook with a few drawings from 2012, a 2015 chapbook of writings and photographs I published in Mexico City, a 2016 artist book with the artist Barbara Ess, a pamphlet for a book collection from Cyprus, an electronic publication on border theatrics, a risograph-printed story that is also translated to Portuguese, a field journal in Spanish, written in Puerto Rico, a book I edited on aliens, and my latest chapbook: Future Tourism.

Since 2013, I've published a bookwork called Dolce Stil Criollo. It is a project between Gabriel Finotti and me that is in the process of becoming a press.

Currently, I teach in the MFA programs at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and at Pratt Institute.

If you would like to know more about me, you could always write me at christopherreyperez (at) gmail (dot) com.