Beth Alvarado is the author of the essay collection "Anxious Attachments," which won the 2020 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and was long listed for the PEN Art of the Essay Award. Her recent story collection, "Jillian in the Borderlands," marries the social justice novel with magical realism, and her memoir, "Anthropologies," is a lyric rendering of her family's history. Her first story collection, "Not a Matter of Love," won the Many Voices Prize from New Rivers Press in 2005. In 2020, she was awarded an Oregon Literary Career Fellowship.

Alvarado believes that everything we write is an evolving experiment and that an education gives us the critical tools and community we need to keep the practice going. She believes that reading and writing are transformative. In addition to teaching, she is an editorial advisor for JackLeg Press and was on the editorial board of Puro Chicanx Writing of the 21st Century. She earned her M.A. in Literature from Stanford University and her MFA in Fiction from the University of Arizona, where she taught for years. You can find her work at bethalvarado.com.