We recently connected with Bianca Alyssa Perez and have shared our conversation below.

Bianca Alyssa, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

Being in an MFA program for Creative Writing really solidified the idea that I could write and teach the creative works professionally. When I was working on my portfolio to submit to the MFA at Texas State University, I was finishing up a year living in Spain, teaching for the first time at an elementary school and I was eager to be back in the classroom as a student. I knew that I wanted to learn more about poetry and poetic craft to focus in on my own writing. In the states, still working on my poetry, I taught at the same elementary school that I went to. I worked and I wrote and I worked and I wrote. And in my spare time, I searched cute apartments in San Marcos, TX to manifest my acceptance into the MFA program. Plot twist: I got accepted in the Poetry track and got hired as a Teaching Assistant for the English Department. For 3 years while in the program, I taught and wrote poetry and essays and poetry. My entire life was creative and artistic and so fulfilling. I knew that I wanted to teach at the university level and write in my spare time. Now it’s almost 4 years since I’ve graduated from the MFA and I’m doing just that. I am now the Program Coordinator for the MFA at Texas State, teaching undergraduate literature and creative writing and writing poetry in the mornings.

Bianca Alyssa, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am a poet (although I’ve been dabbling in CNF lately and have some forthcoming published essays!) from South Texas. I’m also an educator, teaching courses at Texas State University and Texas Lutheran University, and community workshops online and in person. Additionally, I’ve worked as a poetry editor for a literary mag, Porter House Review, and have worked as an editor/mentor for numerous writers as they prepare their poetry manuscripts and novels. I have a chapbook, GEMINI GOSPEL, that won Host Publications’ Spring 2023 Chapbook Prize and that launched my poetry to a wider audience.
My personal writing deals with my Latin heritage, womanhood, sexuality, and religious guilt. I pride myself on my use of visceral images and attention on hybrid poetics.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I enjoy community so much. I like to say that community is one of the pillars of my personality. I am nothing without the people that I surround myself with. I aim to interact with community on a face-to-face level with the workshops that I teach online and in person (usually at my local library. Shoutout to Seguin Public Library!). However, in today’s social environment, being present online also represents a faction of community. Last summer, I worked with a social media assistant, Chelsea Blankenship, and she helped me develop my personal branding, my website, and my online presence on social media (TikTok and Instagram). We even went so far as working on the aesthetic that I wanted to present. Who knew that I wanted to give off dark feminine with a quirky side?! It was all about translating my authentic self to the online world. During this time, working on my social media and building my audience, dare I say that I learned a lot about myself! That’s the advice I would give anyone who is wanting to build a presence online: list out your personality traits, your personal aesthetic, and then try to reflect that into the font you use for graphics, into the videos that you make, into the tone of the posts.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Building community. Period. My favorite thing is after a reading, having someone come up to me and tell me how much this or that poem of mine meant to them. I love going into a bookstore and seeing my friends’ names on the shelves. I love seeing all the amazing workshops, fellowships, publications that my community is a part of. I love the feeling of going into a public space and hearing other people read their work and be proud of their work. It really is a beautiful thing.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.biancalyssaperez.com
• Instagram: biancaperez_poeta

Image Credits

author headshot by Chelsea Blankenship