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Li Yun Alvarado is a poet, writer, scholar, and educator. She is the author of the chapbooks Words or Water and Nuyorico, CA and her work has been published in several journals and anthologies including: Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education; CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art and Action; The Acentos Review; PALABRA, A Magazine of Chicano and Latino Literary Art; and Modern Haiku.
Li Yun was selected as the Honor winner for the 2015 Lee & Low Books' New Voices Award for her picture book manuscript "A Star Named Rosita: The Rita Moreno Story." In 2012, Francisco X. Alarcón selected her poetry manuscript as an honorable mention for The Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. She also received an Academy of American Poetry University Prize in 2009. She is an Acentos Fellow and was selected to participate in VONA Writers Workshop in San Francisco (2006), Astra Writing in Greece (2010), and AROHO in Abiquiu, NM (2015). She served as the Senior Poetry Editor for Kweli Journal from 2015-2016.
Li Yun holds a PhD in English from Fordham University, where she helped coordinate Fordham's Poets Out Loud reading series and book prize as a graduate student. In 2013, she was awarded an AAUW American Fellowship to support research for her dissertation, "Latina New York: Feminist Poetics and the Empire City." She also holds an MA in English with Creative Writing from Fordham University, a graduate certificate from Fordham University's Latin American and Latino Studies Institute, and a BA from Yale University, where she double majored in Spanish and sociology.
She has had the pleasure of teaching literature, composition, and creative writing--in English and in Spanish--to middle school, high school, and college students throughout the country and in the Caribbean.
She is a native New Yorker living in California, who takes frequent trips to Salinas, Puerto Rico to visit la familia.
Li Yun was selected as the Honor winner for the 2015 Lee & Low Books' New Voices Award for her picture book manuscript "A Star Named Rosita: The Rita Moreno Story." In 2012, Francisco X. Alarcón selected her poetry manuscript as an honorable mention for The Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. She also received an Academy of American Poetry University Prize in 2009. She is an Acentos Fellow and was selected to participate in VONA Writers Workshop in San Francisco (2006), Astra Writing in Greece (2010), and AROHO in Abiquiu, NM (2015). She served as the Senior Poetry Editor for Kweli Journal from 2015-2016.
Li Yun holds a PhD in English from Fordham University, where she helped coordinate Fordham's Poets Out Loud reading series and book prize as a graduate student. In 2013, she was awarded an AAUW American Fellowship to support research for her dissertation, "Latina New York: Feminist Poetics and the Empire City." She also holds an MA in English with Creative Writing from Fordham University, a graduate certificate from Fordham University's Latin American and Latino Studies Institute, and a BA from Yale University, where she double majored in Spanish and sociology.
She has had the pleasure of teaching literature, composition, and creative writing--in English and in Spanish--to middle school, high school, and college students throughout the country and in the Caribbean.
She is a native New Yorker living in California, who takes frequent trips to Salinas, Puerto Rico to visit la familia.
Words or Water
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Praise for Words or Water:
Li Yun Alvarado's Words or Water is an affective map of the Nuyorican archipelago, as oceanic as it is embodied. In vivid and uncompromising poems—about love and family, about the politics of tweezing and the intricacies of Puerto Rican rum, about the artist Keith Haring's lover Juanito Xtravaganza and the imperialism of Old Navy t-shirts—Alvarado traces the “Atlantic currents” of diaspora while honoring quotidian practices of survival and struggle: “my parents government-cheesed / our lives into normalcy.” Women emerge here as counter-genealogical figures (Don Quijote's Dulcinea, the poet Julia de Burgos, who provides an epigraph, mothers and sisters, biological and otherwise) and as guides to a revolutionary knowledge, an affirmation of our bodies even as they are policed and colonized. From the port cities of Nuyorico, Words or Water claims its own freedom by rerouting geographies:“homes anchored / to hearts and backs.” In that sense, the title is not so much binary as it is strategic and metaphorical; Alvarado's flow finds words for “estos latidos” (“these heartbeats”) while memorializing what words fail to convey: "I scavenge for lost / pockets of me."
-- Urayoán Noel author of Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico and In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam |
Li Yun Alvarado's poems carve a double-tongued space of longing and resistance, where we can pause to breathe. Read release and renewal in the soft, clear light of her words.
-- Evie Shockley, author of a half-red sea and the new black
-- Evie Shockley, author of a half-red sea and the new black
In Words or Water, Li Yun Alvarado chooses both. This book is simultaneously a meditation and a riptide. External violences from bullets to cancer disrupt our inner worlds. Unconditional love brings us back to center where life regenerates into its full prowess in the nuances of a first and final breath. We are reminded that life is good even when it isn’t.
-- Magdalena Gómez, poet, playwright, educator; author of Shameless Woman
-- Magdalena Gómez, poet, playwright, educator; author of Shameless Woman
Photo © Diana Delatorre
Copyright © 2010, Li Yun Alvarado. All rights reserved.
