Valerie Perreault is a poet, printmaker, and illustrator. She was born in New Jersey, raised in Chicago, went to art school in Dallas, spent her twenties in Austin and Boston, and has been living in the Florida Keys since 2012.

She is the winner of the 2026 Scotti Merrill Emerging Writer Award in Poetry, selected by former U.S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, and the 2024 Richard Snyder Prize in Poetry, selected by Matthew Rohrer. Her book Neon Pastoral was published October 2025 and she appeared with Billy Collins in a reading at San Carlos Institute during the 2026 Key West Literary Seminar. Her book has been recently included in the permanent collection at the U.S. Library of Congress.

Perreault has created commissioned visual art for public, hospitality, and international settings. Her projects include a site-specific installation for Zaytinya by José Andrés at The Ritz-Carlton, Royal Caribbean, the Four Seasons in Maui, The Port of San Diego, and an ongoing featured artist collaboration with Opposite Wall.

In 2024, her solo exhibition Neon Pastoral at The Studios of Key West presented a collection of cut and reassembled block-print works. This was a marked pivot from her earlier more illustrative work.

In retrospect, the physical construction of Neon Pastoral anticipated the transformation that followed it. After the exhibition, her visual practice underwent a similar dismantling. She stepped away from artmaking for nearly two years while its separate elements (poetry, printmaking, memory, and myth) slowly reassembled into a new language.

 Her newest visual-art collection, The Dark Field, 2026, is a narrative body of dark-field monotypes that explore art as alchemical journey and transformation, with themes of memory retrieval, grief, bloodlines, feminine interiority, and mythmaking as a way of understanding lived experience.  

 After a decade as a working artist Perreault’s visual art and poetry are aligning in a shared interest in viewing the modern Western cultural story through the lens of ancient mythology and folklore.