Biography

Desirée Alvarez is a painter, fabric artist, printmaker and poet who was born and lives in New York City. Her work speaks of the secret powers and beauty of nature, humans, and animals. She has won numerous awards including an American Academy of Arts and Letters Willard L. Metcalf Award, three Artist Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (most recently in 2011), an Urban Artist Initiative grant and a European Capital of Culture Award. She has been an artist in residence at P.S. 122 and Yaddo. Alvarez has won poetry and non-fiction awards with poems appearing in Poetry Magazine, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, and Prairie Schooner. Poets House awarded her a 2012 Emerging Poets Residency and she received a Pushcart Prize nomination. She exhibits widely and her fabric art can be seen in spring 2013 at Piermont Straus Gallery and in fall at Central Booking Gallery in the Lower East Side. She teaches at New York City College of Technology, CUNY.