Celia Lisset Alvarez

Celia Lisset Alvarez began writing short stories and received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Miami with a fiction concentration. She published a number of stories in places such as zingmagazine and Poui, and, most recently, in MotherVerse. She has also published essays in Other Investigations and Lore. For the past year, however, she has concentrated on poetry, publishing in journals such as The Powhatan Review, Tar Wolf Review, and the Iodine Poetry Journal, and producing a chapbook, The Stones (Finishing Line Press, 2006).She teaches composition and literature at St. Thomas University in Miami Gardens, Florida, and lives with her husband and their extended family in Miami. Although she is the Spanish-born daughter of Cuban exiles, she grew up in Miami, and considers it home.

Shapeshifting
Celia Lisset Alvarez
Winner of the 2005 Spire Poetry Award

ISBN: 978-0974070179, $12.00

“Alvarez’s language is sure-footed, precise and unflinching in her descriptions of domestic life.  Many of the poems, such as her sonnet crown gem, “Mother,” examine women’s societal roles.  In the scathing poem, “Papi,” an homage to Plath’s “Daddy,” Alvarez takes on the establishment in the person of Cuba’s Castro.  In a masterpiece that records the poverty and despair of modern life, “Hialeah,” Alvarez describes the road into the city this way, “All day long the traffic groans / like a birthing woman.” 

—Lana Hechtman Ayers, author of Love is a Weed,
editor of the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Series.