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.
Aliens Beyond Paradise / Alienígenas más allá del paraíso is a bilingual English-Spanish publication I edited, following a collective editorial and publishing workshop organized by Beta-Local (San Juan, Puerto Rico) at the Queens Museum on July 21, 2019, in conjunction with the exhibition Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas. Exploring the ambiguous concept of the alien, I invited contributors in Mexico and Puerto Rico to consider what it means to extract a textual excerpt, fragment, annotation, or image from its context, and send it across a border. How might we think of exchange beyond the regulating binary of inside and outside?
I wrote an editorial essay that prefaces the works from the following contributors: Aravind Adyanthaya, Andrés Monzón-Aguirre, Ramiro Chaves & MANIMAS, Colectivo Se habla español, Nicole Delgado, Amara Abdal Figueroa, Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola, Diego Gerard, Amanda Hernández, Mauricio Marcin, Jason Mena, Andrés Paniagua, Iberia Pérez, Mariana Rodríguez, Luis Othoniel Rosa, Jorge Sánchez, and Dmitri Zurita.
Co-published with the Queens Museum. All sales proceeds will be donated to RAICES - The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, a nonprofit agency founded in 1986, which promotes justice by providing free and low-cost legal services to underserved immigrant children, families, and refugees. Learn more about RAICES here.
Bilingual in Spanish & English. Designed by Simran Ankolker and Rachel Valinsky. 79 pages. 2-color risograph print, printed at Queens Museum. Bound at Small Editions. Published by Wendy's Subway and Queens Museum.
Purchase a copy here.