Ashley Hope Pérez

About Ashley Hope Pérez

Ashley Hope Pérez is an American author and scholar whose fiction engages deeply with questions of race, identity, and justice in American history. She grew up in Texas and pursued graduate study in comparative literature, earning her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Her academic background informs her fiction, which often roots personal stories of love, loss, and survival in specific historical moments of systemic oppression.

Her debut novel, What Can't Wait (2011), follows a Mexican-American teenager in Houston navigating family expectations, academic ambition, and a first relationship. The novel draws on Pérez's own background and her work with Latino youth in Texas. While What Can't Wait received strong reviews and established Pérez as a significant voice in YA fiction, it was her second novel that brought her wider attention and, eventually, controversy.

Out of Darkness (2015) is set in New London, Texas, in 1937, weaving together the true story of the New London School explosion—one of the deadliest school disasters in American history—with a fictional love story between a Mexican-American girl and a Black boy in a rigidly segregated community. The novel examines the brutal realities of Jim Crow-era racism and includes depictions of sexual assault, violence, and interracial relationships. It won the Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children's Book Award and the Américas Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature.

In recent years, Out of Darkness has become one of the most frequently banned books in American school districts, appearing on challenged book lists across Texas and other states. Bans have accelerated in the context of broader legislative efforts to restrict classroom materials dealing with race, sexuality, and American history. Pérez has been an outspoken opponent of these bans, arguing that the same systemic racism depicted in her novel is driving attempts to remove it from schools.