The 2025-26 Koch Memorial Editors: Emma Catherine Perry and Daniel Peña

The Koch Memorial Editor in poetry for the 2025-26 academic year is Emma Catherine Perry. Emma is a writer from Newfields, New Hampshire, and the author of the poetry collection BLOCKS WORLD (Great Place Books). Her poems appear in FENCE, Quarterly West, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. She has taught writing in classrooms and writing centers at Cornell University, University of Georgia, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and University of Idaho. She currently lives in Moscow, Idaho, where she directs the university writing center and teaches in the English department. 

The Koch fiction editor is Daniel Peña. Daniel is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer and Associate Professor at the University of North Texas where he teaches in the PhD Program in Creative Writing. Formerly, he was based out of the UNAM in Mexico City where he worked as Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar. A graduate of Cornell University and a former Picador Guest Professor in Leipzig, Germany, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, The Rumpus, the Kenyon Review, Texas Monthly, NBC News, and The New York Times Magazine among  other venues. He’s currently a regular contributor to the Guardian and the Ploughshares blog. His novel, Bang, is out now from Arte Publico Press. He lives in the beautiful Dallas-Fort Worth area.