María Isabel Álvarez is a first-generation Guatemalan American writer and educator. Her short stories have been awarded the Phyllis Grant Zellmer Prize for Fiction and are published or forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, and Gulf Coast, among other venues. She has received fellowships, grants, and residencies from The Elizabeth George Foundation, the Speculative Literature Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Colgate Writers Conference, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Hedgebrook. She lives and teaches in upstate New York, where she is at work on a novel and a collection of short stories.