Miriam Zoila Pérez is an award-winning queer Cuban American writer and activist. Their work, which mostly looks at the intersections of race, health and gender, is motivated by a desire to understand how the world shapes our bodies, and to explore all the many solutions that already exist for some of our biggest problems, but simply don’t get the attention they deserve.

Their debut young adult fiction novel, Camila Núñez’s Year of Disasters, was published by Page Street YA in 2025 and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Muévelo: The Enduring Legacy of Latin Music, a non-fiction book with podcast co-host Verónica Bayetti Flores, was released in August 2026 by Running Press.

Their writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian and Colorlines, among other outlets. Pérez’s work has appeared in a number of anthologies, including the NYT Bestselling anthology, Not That Bad, edited by Roxane Gay. Pérez’s 2016 TED Talk How Racism is Harming Pregnant Women–and What Can Help, has been viewed over a million times. Pérez is the author of the self-published Radical Doula Guide: A Political Primer for Full-Spectrum Pregnancy and Childbirth Support.

Learn more about Pérez here.