Faculty Directory

Amy Alvarez

Associate Professor of the Practice, Messina College

Profile

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.

Awards & Publications

PUBLICATIONS

 

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