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.
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).
She lives and writes in the desert southwest.