Black Lawrence Press
"What to read when you want to celebrate Women's History,"
The Rumpus.
Praise for Jillian in the Borderlands
With the ecstatic knowledge of an ancient curandera and the playful, storytelling prowess of a child, Alvarado travels great distances, bears witness, presages problems, and intuits solutions. She isn’t just at the forefront of white writers writing about race, she’s at the forefront of people writing about what it means to be human and how we might survive our own dangerous shortcomings. Masterful and original, her voice has been here since the before-time; in a world that needs healing and vision more than ever, it would behoove us all to listen.
~Jennifer Tseng, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness
Autumn House Press
Longlisted for the PEN Art of the Essay Award & Winner of the Oregon Book Award
Praise for Anxious Attachments
Alvarado’s gorgeous essays evoke the fluidity and awe of an underwater journey. She offers us a tour of grief—its causes, its cultural conditions, its grasp. In delineating, with devotion, with humor, losses that are at once ordinary and extraordinary, material and supernatural, she offers the reader a chance to better see what’s right in front of them. This book is an act of generosity, of friendship, of remembrance. I felt my head turned by it, encouraged to see my everyday loves with wider eyes.
~Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit.
University of Iowa Press
‘Memory is a silent room, a home movie from an old Brownie camera,’ Beth Alvarado writes. Her memoir, Anthropologies, suggests otherwise: there is little silence here. Instead everything is sound and light: story stacked up on story, memory on dream, aperture after aperture opening and staying open, recording past the final page. Anthropologies offers us the eternal present tense of memory: all our lives and our families’ lives existing at once, like the voice of her father, preserved on her mother’s answering machine and now here with many others in this lovely echo chamber of a book.
~Ander Monson, Vanishing Point
New Rivers Press
Alvarado’s is a formidable talent, wise and witty and unflinching. To read her fiction is to understand two terrible truths: that humans hardly ever understand each other, and that we will persist relentlessly in an attempt to do so. This is serious, beautiful work.
~Antonya Nelson, Bound
About Me
My recent book, Jillian in the Borderlands: A Cycle of Rather Dark Tales, is described by one reviewer as "marrying the social-justice novel with magical realism." Another reviewer writes: "Alvarado’s use of many voices not only showcases her talent for dialogue but also challenges the tendency to make stories and histories of people and places linear and from a single perspective."
In my nonfiction, I have written extensively about marrying into my late husband's family when I was 19 years old. My essay collection Anxious Attachments was long listed for the PEN Art of the Essay Award and won the 2020 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Taken together as a larger narrative, these essays are about the power of love to revise who we are, what we believe, and what our story is. It is now available on Audible.
Much of my work is set in Tucson Arizona, where Fernando and I grew up and raised our children. My lyric memoir Anthropologies layers scenes, oral histories, and dreams from both his family and my own. My first story collection, Not a Matter of Love, won the Many Voices Project Prize for work that the final judge called "wise and witty and unflinching."
I taught at the University of Arizona for many years and now am on the faculty at Oregon State University-Cascades Low Residency MFA Program. I am on the Advisory Board of JackLeg Press
and the Editorial Board of Puro Chicanx Writing of the 21st Century, sponsored by Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts and the BlackEarth Institute. In 2020, I was awarded an Oregon Literary Career Fellowship.
I have decided to work as a consultant with a few writers a year. If you are interested, please see the final page of this website for information and then feel free to email me with questions at bethalvarado1@gmail.com.
