María Isabel Álvarez is a first-generation Guatemalan American writer and educator with fifteen years of combined creative, administrative, academic, and non-profit experience. Her areas of expertise include grant writing, email marketing, copywriting, editing, proofreading, document design, content creation, program management, and event coordination. Her true passion, however, is fiction writing.
Since graduating with her MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University, her fiction has received support in the form of fellowships, grants, and scholarships from The Elizabeth George Foundation, Speculative Literature Foundation, Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Colgate Writers Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, and Hedgebrook. Her short stories have been awarded the Phyllis Grant Zellmer Prize for Fiction and are published in Guernica, Michigan Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, and Gulf Coast, among other venues.
As part of her commitment to upholding the literary arts in her community, she teaches seminars through various humanities centers and cultural institutions. She also moderates virtual panels, lectures, and readings. Her recent activities include moderating a conversation with U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón at the Binghamton Center for Writers, hosting a webinar with the Hedgebrook Artist Residency, teaching an online course through the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, facilitating a poetry reading with The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center, and serving as a panelist at the 2018 and the 2022 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference.
Currently, she supports the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory as Senior Communications Specialist.