My Life as a Writer & Culture Creator

My poetry, short story, novel-in-progress, plays, and hybrid work, and reviews have been published in many journals and magazines including Tupelo Quarterly, Prick of the Spindle, Split Lip, and Danse Macabre. I've been a featured reader at many literary events, a fiction resident at Vermont Studio Center, have had my play "The Life of Leo Wool" produced, and many of my one act plays have been staged. 

I received my BA in English in 1999 with a concentration in creative writing, and my MA in English in 2003 with a concentration in literary theory. Both degrees were from the University at Albany, where I also won the Shields McIlwaine award for best poem.

After spending a semester of my master's degree study abroad at the University of Cape Town in 2001, I wrote my master’s thesis “Apocalypse is Genesis: Homi Bhabha and the Third Space of South African Culture,” combining creative nonfiction, interview, memoir, and criticism to explore black South African literature and culture through the lenses of post-colonialism and intersubjectivity.

I think I've always been interested in making art that explores the personal in the public, the intersubjective in what we otherwise see as psychological separation, the way that the sublime exists on the edges of the mundane, and the way that we can be many things at once. This may be influenced by being half Puerto Rican and half white, growing up with that sense of not quite fitting in either space. But I also think it comes from being a deep empath and not always knowing where I end and others begin. 

It also led to some of my best art and to some of the richest human experiences I've had. 

As a Culture Creator

All my work incorporates these multiplicities across planes of being and knowing mentioned above. And when I publish the work of others, it's because I see this psychological and energetic dynamism there too. That is why I create my press Cosmographia Books, literally named after the historical cosmographia, an atlas and a gazetteer containing the geographical makeup, social statistics, and physical features of a region. 

"In 2015, Nina Alvarez founded a press that would seek to embody that spirit of multidimensional mapping. Since then, Cosmographia Books has published a diverse array of titles that explore the individual's relationship to self, soul, love, work, society, and history."

This technical and metaphysical eye for multidimensional mapping has been with me as I've created and taught dozens of writing workshops, guided artists through their own creative journeys, taken on large and small publishing projects, learned how to do energetic healing for myself and others, and am even learning how to encode my art with energetic activations. 

As a mentor to a diverse array of writers for over twenty years, as well as a professional editor, writing coach, publisher, book promoter, and teaching artist.

Dream Your Book

Cosmographia Books

Canvas Literary Journal

Writers & Books