Pérez is the director of communications at Safe from Online Sex Abuse (SOSA), a nonprofit dedicated to fighting online child sex abuse. One part of her job is running the organization’s website and social media. The other part is working undercover with law enforcement to help identify and arrest child predators who abuse children online. Along with the rest of her team, she poses as an underage decoy, creates fake social media accounts, and even helps law enforcement to stage “pretend” teen bedrooms.

Her child advocacy work has been featured on Undercover Underage, a Max, Discovery+, and YouTube TV docuseries that follows the SOSA team as they launch decoy teen accounts online, communicate with adults contacting minors, track down their true identities, and collaborate with law enforcement to stop them from harming more children and teens. The show has attracted an international audience and has been featured by Good Morning America, Forbes, Elle magazine, and other major media outlets.

Jordan Pérez appears on Undercover Underage

For the second season of Undercover Underage, SOSA and law enforcement worked cases continuously for three months straight. Pérez notes that it was exhausting but highly effective. “One of the most gratifying arrests for me was when we identified a stepdad who had been abusing his stepdaughter for four years—since she was eight years old. We were able to make sure he would never do so again. He received 15 years in prison plus 10 years of probation. Conclusions like this make the long hours and horrific messages we have to encounter worthwhile.”

For Pérez, it’s imperative that her work is alignment with her values, which is why she loves her job at SOSA. “The most rewarding part of working in childhood sexual abuse prevention is constantly hearing exactly how you're making folks' lives better,” she explains. “I hear from survivors daily about the way our work has validated them and given them hope. It's also rewarding when we're working an undercover operation and facilitate the arrest of a highly dangerous perpetrator.”

Gentleness, Curiosity, and Generosity of Spirit

For Pérez, her life as a poet and child advocate overlap in many ways. “In my book, Santa Tarantula (Notre Dame Press, February 2024), there are a number of poems with themes of feeling unsafe as a child,” she says. “Sexual violence is a big throughline for the book.” 

Pérez’s poetry has received critical praise and been recognized by the Andrés Montoya Prize, the Poetry International Prize, the Joy Harjo Prize, American University’s Myra Sklarew Award for Remarkable Originality in Poetry, and others. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Poetry International, The Mississippi Review, and other journals. Her book Santa Tarantula has been hailed as “a memorable and powerful collection,” by Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine. Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, author of The Inheritance of Haunting, wrote, “Pérez’s poems remind us there is always life, connection, and pleasure to be made anew."

When asked if she identifies more as a poet or a communications professional or a child advocate, Pérez says, “I don't think I have One Big Identifier that feels like it fits me perfectly. But I do think of myself as a poet — not just because I write poetry, but also because of how I take space in the world. I approach my daily life with gentleness, curiosity, and generosity of spirit ... all attributes that help one be a good poet, in my opinion.”

A Poet’s Life

Pérez’s introduction poetry writing came almost by chance. As an undergrad, she studied economics because she felt it was practical. But she always loved reading and writing, and a literature professor encouraged her to sign up for a poetry workshop. “I immediately knew it was something I had to pursue,” she says. “I love how you can hold a poem in your mind all at once... something I can't do with a short story or a novel.”

Pérez says she wasn’t always immune to feelings of imposter syndrome when it came to being a poet. “I feel I'm less well-read than many poets, and I don't always have the literary terms or references that my peers do,” she explains. “I worked through that by realizing that I don't want to define myself in opposition to people around me—I want to define myself according to myself. I have the power to say who I am.”

She first became interested in American University’s Creative Writing MFA Program because she admired the poetry of AU Literature Professor Kyle Dargan. She was an undergrad at the University of Georgia, and she read Dargan’s work, which was published by the University of Georgia Press. “As I researched grad schools, I was interested in how AU’s program was three years long (longer than most),” she says. “I've always been attracted to DC as a city, so I was curious about what it would be like to go to school there.”

When she arrived at AU, Pérez found a mentor in Dargan. He says, "There was a quiet ferocity to Jordan and her poetry when she came to the program. She is unflinching as an artist, but careful as a person. I think that combination, like warm and cool winds meeting in the sky, are what generate the little hurricanes that are her poems."

One of Pérez’s favorite memories from her time at AU was participating in casual poetry readings. “One of my friends, Jackie, kindly and regularly hosted a group of students at her house,” she says. “We would eat dinner, talk, and read our work aloud. Getting to share work outside the structures of a workshop class was very meaningful for me.”

To Learn More

To learn more about child sexual abuse prevention, visit SOSA’s website, or watch Undercover Underage. To learn more about Pérez or her new book Santa Tarantula, visit her website.