Emilly Prado

She is the author of Funeral for Flaca (Future Tense Books, 2021), an essay collection called, “Utterly vulnerable, bold, and unique,” by Ms. Magazine and a winner of a 2022 Pacific Northwest Book Award, a 2021 bronze winner of the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in Essays, and several other honors. She is also the author of Examining Assimilation (Enslow, 2019), a youth non-fiction book at the intersections of identity and U.S. history. As a former full-time freelance journalist, Emilly spent half a decade reporting on a wide range of topics, most often centered on amplifying the voices and experiences of people from marginalized communities. Her writing and photographs have appeared in more than 30 publications including NPR, Marie Claire, Bitch Media, Eater, Oxygen, and The Oregonian. She has earned an Ich Chuvawve Teaching Fellowship from Arizona State University, Walter E. Dakin Nonfiction Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, an Emerging Journalists Community Storytelling Fellowship (awarded in partnership with Oregon Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Pulitzer Prizes), and a Blackburn Fellowship from the Randolph College MFA. Past residencies include Caldera Arts, Carolyn Moore Writers House, Guapamacátaro, Sou’Wester, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Emilly is a co-founder of BIPOC arts non-profit, Portland in Color. She has worked with students of all ages including in public high schools, youth detention centers, and literary organizations including Tin House, Lighthouse, Corporeal Writing, Literary Arts, and the Independent Publishing Resource Center. She teaches creative writing at the Pacific Northwest College of Arts MFA and moonlights as DJ Mami Miami with Noche Libre, the Latiné DJ collective she co-founded in 2017