Lisa Alvarez’s debut collection, Some Final Beauty and other Stories, was published in 2025 by the University of Nevada Press, as part of their New Oeste imprint which promotes Latinx writers of the American West.

She received her MFA in fiction from UC Irvine. Her work has appeared in About Place Journal, Air/Light, Citric Acid, Huizache, Journal of the Plague Years, Santa Monica Review and elsewhere, including anthologies such as Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America (Norton) and the recent Women in a Golden State: California Poets at 60 and Beyond (Gunpowder Press). Devoted to promoting the writing of California, she has edited three anthologies including Orange County: A Literary Field Guide (Heyday) and Why to These Rocks: Fifty Years of Poems from the Community of Writers (Heyday). A professor of English at Irvine Valley College, in the summers she co-directs the writing workshops at the Community of Writers in Olympic Valley. Born and raised in the Los Angeles area, she lives in Modjeska Canyon in the Santa Ana mountains.