is a poet, essayist, educator, and cultural producer based in Maui, Hawaiʻi.

An adoptee born in Las Vegas, NV and raised in Brooklyn, NY she holds an MFA from Bennington College and is Associate Director of The Merwin Conservancy, an arts and ecology organization that cares for the home and garden of poet W.S. Merwin. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, Willow Springs, Waxwing, diode, Pleiades, Swamp Pink, The Baltimore Review, RHINO, Radar, Cider Press Review, wildness, diode, Shō Poetry Journal, Verse Daily, Brooklyn Poets, Only Poems, & The Fairy Tale Review, among other journals. She was recently awarded the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association/ Gwenn A. Nussbaum Scholarship and the Coniston Prize by Radar Poetry, judged by January Gill O’Neil. She was a finalist for the Scotti Merrill Emerging Writer Award, commended for the Gregory Djanikian Scholarship, and shortlisted for the Disquiet Prize. She was a previous AWP Writer-to-Writer mentee. She is a mentor in the Adroit Journal Summer Program, a Bennington Writing Seminars Alumni Fellow, and a 2025-2026 Tin House Reading Fellow. Her work has been further supported by workshops, fellowships, and residencies through Tin House, Tupelo Press, Key West Literary Seminars, and Yaddo. Drawing on her experiences as an adoptee and the child of a Cuban exile, Peláez frequently explores in her work themes of displacement, diaspora, filial grief, transformation, and resilience. She is currently seeking a publisher for her debut poetry collection, which explores the ways absence, archival loss, and fractured inheritance shape our understanding of the self