Meet the Poet: Emma Trelles

Emma Trelles is the daughter of Cuban immigrants and author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Her current manuscript Courage and the Clock was a finalist for the 2026 Louise Bogan Award for poetry and shortlisted for the 2025 Donald Hall Prize. She is the ninth Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, California, and the recipient of an Established Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council and a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. A graduate CantoMundo Fellow, her translations were longlisted in the Best Literary Translations 2027 anthology, and her work recently appears in Poetry International; New England Review; Poetry; and the Academy’s Poem-A-Day series. She is series editor of the Alta California Chapbook Prize, open to Latine poets in the U.S. and published in bilingual editions by Gunpowder Press. emmatrelles.com