Gessy Alvarez

Discipline: Poetry

Based In: Maywood, NJ

Year at Millay: 2013

Fellowship: Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellowship

Awards/Honors: Finalist, The St. Lawrence Book Award, Black Lawrence Press, Mount Vernon, NY (2022); Semi-Finalist, Hudson Prize, Black Lawrence Press, Mount Vernon, NY (2022); Finalist, The Katharine Porter Prize, University of North Texas Press, University of North Texas, Denton, TX (2018); Artist-in-Residence, KHN Residency, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Nebraska City, NE (2011).

Website: http://gessyalvarez.com/

Gessy Alvarez is a writer, editor, and publisher. She is the publisher of Digging Press and series editor of the Digging Press Chapbook Series. Her recent projects include the novel Last Kingdom in Astoria and the short story collection Love the Abyss (née Taste the World on Your Skin), a finalist for the 2022 Black Lawrence / St. Lawrence Book Award, The Katharine Porter Prize (University of North Texas Press, 2018) and a semi-finalist for the Black Lawrence Hudson Prize (2022).

Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Acentos Review, Hobart, Asteri(x), Volume One Brooklyn, Feminine Collective, and other publications.

She earned an MFA from Columbia University and has received support from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Millay Arts, where she was a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow.

Gessy was born in New York City, the daughter of an Ecuadorian mother and Dominican father. She works in New York City and Bergen County, New Jersey.