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Ivy Alvarez is an award-winning Filipino-Australian poet, editor, and reviewer currently residing in Wales. A prolific writer, Alvarez has had her work featured in various publications in Australia, Canada, England, the Philippines, Ireland, Russia, Scotland, Wales, the USA, and online.

Biography
Alvarez was born in the Philippines and grew up in Tasmania, Australia. While reading English at the University of Tasmania, she was published in various literary journals and anthologies, and subsequently became the reviews editor of Cordite Poetry Review, an Australian online poetry journal. In 2000, she won the Great Age Melbourne Writers Festival Poetry Slam.

She moved to Aberdeen in 2002 and lived in Dublin between 2003 and 2004. In 2004, she was awarded a bursary from the Scottish Arvon Foundation and became the Special Poetry Guest to Dublin’s Trinity College/Florida International University poetry summer program. During the same year, her poem "earth", which first appeared in the anthology Moorilla Mosaic: Contemporary Tasmanian Writing, was included in the Australian/Pacific Region Literacy Placement Test for Scholarships. Alvarez was awarded fellowships from MacDowell Colony (New Hampshire, USA) and Hawthornden Castle (Scotland) in 2005.

In 2006, she edited A Slice of Cherry Pie, a chapbook anthology inspired by David Lynch's TV show, Twin Peaks. That same year, she received a grant from Wales Arts International which enabled her to travel to Sydney and participate in the The Red Room Company’s "The Poetry Picture Show".

Her first poetry collection, Mortal, was released in 2006 by US publisher Red Morning Press. Craig Santos Perez, writing for Boxcar Poetry Review, called it "an incredible first collection" whose "casual tone, visceral imagery, and surprising figurative language keeps the reader engaged throughout." In late 2006, Alvarez received The Australia Council Literature Board grant for poetry. She was invited on a writing residency by Fundación Valparaíso in Spain for April 2008.

As a performer of her work, she has been Artiste-in-Residence for Australia's SBS radio and TV network. Her poetry has been featured on the audio compilations FlightPaths, Going Down Swinging and You Have Been Chosen.

Having been a guest at numerous writing festivals, including the National Young Writers' Festival in Newcastle, New South Wales, Alvarez was recently writer-in-residence at the Booranga Writers Centre at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales. In addition to poetry, she also writes plays, articles, and reviews. Alvarez was awarded funding for her second poetry manuscript from both the Australia Council and the Welsh Academy.

Poetry collections

 * Food for Humans (Melbourne: Slow Joe Crow Press, 2002)
 * catalogue: life as tableware (Wales: The Private Press, 2004)
 * What’s wrong (Wales: The Private Press, 2004)
 * Mortal (Washington, DC: Red Morning Press, 2006)

Edited volumes

 * A Slice of Cherry Pie (The Private Press / Half Empty/Half Full, 2006)
 * We Don’t Stop Here (The Private Press, 2008)

Anthology contributions

 * Moorilla Mosaic (Bumble-bee Press, 2001)
 * Father Poems (Anvil Publishing, 2004)
 * The First Hay(na)ku Anthology (Meritage Press / xPress(ed), 2005)
 * OBAN 06 (NZ Electronic Poetry Centre, 2006)
 * NaPoWriMo (Big Game Books, 2006)
 * From the Garden of the Gods (Sun Rising Press, 2006)
 * The Musculature of Small Birds (Shadowbox Press, 2007)
 * Brilliant Coroners (Phoenicia Publishing imprint, 2007)
 * What is Our Sex? (Vignette Press, 2007)
 * Letters to the World: Women Poets Anthology (Red Hen Press, 2008)
 * The 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets (Outside Voices, 2008)