Derenz M. "Carson" Perez is currently a second-year Master of Divinity student at Yale Divinity and Berkeley Divinity Schools and is pursuing ordination in the Episcopal Church. After graduating early from YDS/BDS, in Fall 2008, he plans to serve full-time at a parish in California and eventually do service work in China and the Philippines, where he was born.

Carson graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English, with a concentration in literature, from Northwest College, in Kirkland Washington (ten miles east of Seattle). Originally from the Pentecostal tradition, he first became attracted to Anglicanism when he studied abroad in Fall 2001 (his last semester of college), at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, affiliated with Keble College, Oxford University. He played his violin at Oxford's St. Aldate's and continues to play the violin in YDS's Marquand Chapel. He began playing the violin since the fourth grade, in Orange County, California, and earned a fine arts scholarship at Northwest for violin performance and poetry.

When Carson is not reading text books in and writing papers for New Testament Interpretation, Foundations of Christian Worship, and the English Reformation Liturgical Traditions and the Evolution of the Anglican Books of Common Prayer, he dreams of traveling through Spain, eating coffee ice cream, or downhill snow-skiing in Salt Lake, where his family resides.