ABOUT

My mami said I was born a pain in the nalgas. Or rather, I was born eager to leave the womb and pave my own path. I arrived three weeks early and with double the Ls an Emilly Giselle Prado might be expected to have. My hometown is Redwood City, California. I mostly grew up in Belmont, two towns over, because my parents—a Mexican immigrant that came to California at the age of two and a Mexican American U.S. citizen who was raised in Mexico until 17—wanted their children to come of age in a place where college was expected. It also happened to be a place that was predominantly white, and that never really felt like home.

Toni Cade Bambara said, “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” This is a guiding principle of my work—whether hosting a community event, writing, DJing, or teaching. I’ve used writing as a tool to process, to amplify the stories of people who have historically been pushed to the margins through journalism, and now to share my own experiences through memoir, essay, and fiction forms. Meanwhile, DJing and teaching are arenas for exchange and community. Nowadays I live in Portland, Oregon with my husband and our rescue pit bull, and continue to work towards making my community feel more like home. I didn’t always have the ganas or access to think of writing as a career, or even know this kind of life I’m building was within reach, but I’m honored to center art, social justice, and healing in my work today.

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Long bio:

Emilly Prado is an award-winning writer and educator living in Portland, Oregon with roots in the San Francisco Bay Area and Michoacán, Mexico. 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 fellowships including an Ich Chuvawve Teaching Fellowship from Arizona State University, Walter E. Dakin Nonfiction Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the 2018 Emerging Journalists, Community Stories Fellowship (awarded in partnership with Oregon Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Pulitzer Prizes), and the Blackburn Fellowship from Randolph College where she received her MFA. She been awarded residencies from 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 in settings such as public high schools, universities, MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility, 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. Learn more at emillyprado.com or on social media @emillygprado.

Emilly is currently writing a memoir, and a novel, and is seeking literary representation.

Short bio: