Maria Isabel Alvarez

María Isabel Álvarez is a first-generation Guatemalan American writer and educator. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a BA in English Literature from Arizona State University. Her areas of expertise include grant writing, speech writing, email marketing, copywriting, editing, proofreading, document design, content creation, program management, and event coordination. She also writes and publishes literary fiction.

For her writing, she has received 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, poetry, and book reviews are published in literary journals such as Guernica, Michigan Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, and Gulf Coast. She received the 2022 Phyllis Grant Zellmer Prize for Fiction and the 2016 Blue Earth Review Flash Fiction prize, and has been anthologized in The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States (Tia Chucha Press, 2017), Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction (Aformentioned Productions, 2019), and No Tender Fences: Immigrant and First-Generation American Poetry (2019). Alongside the poet, Dante Di Stefano, she co-edited the poetry anthology, Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018).

From 2021 to 2023, she taught multi-genre creative writing workshops at SUNY Binghamton, where she was a lecturer and Associate Director of Creative Writing. Currently, she supports the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory as Senior Communications Specialist.