Associate Professor of the Practice, Messina College
Telephone: 617-552-6003
Email: amy.alvarez@bc.edu
ORCID 0009-0006-2786-7482
Amy M. Alvarez was born in New York, New York to Jamaican and Puerto Rican parents. She is the author of the poetry collection Makeshift Altar (2024) and the co-editor of Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology (2023). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Poetry, The Missouri Review, Callaloo, Smartish Pace, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from CantoMundo, Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, Macondo, the Virginia Creative Arts Center, and the Furious Flower Center for Black Poetry. Her writing and scholarship focuses on race, ethnicity, gender identities, regionality, borderless-ness, systemic injustice, and social equity. She teaches writing and literature courses at BC’s Messina College.
Books
Makeshift Altar. University Press of Kentucky, 2024.
Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology. West Virginia University Press, 2023.
Selected Poems
Poetry, August 2023: “Hood Aesthetic”
Salamander, Spring/Summer 2022: “Gloria, In Excelsis”
Ploughshares, April 2022: “Hadeology”
ANMLY, April 2022: “Boondocks:”
The Cincinnati Review, miCRo series, November 2021: “Spring Semester”
The Acentos Review, June 2020: “8:46,” “lighting candles on my stoop/watching the wind snuff them out”
Alaska Quarterly Review, Winter/Spring 2020: “Street Corner Market, Philadelphia”
The Missouri Review, 2020: “149th Street Notebook”
Professional Activities
Senior Poetry Editor at Harbor Review
Latine/x Caucus Leadership Team, Association of Writers and Writing Programs