Steven Alvarez is an Assistant Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. He was born in Safford, Arizona, the son of Mexican immigrants. He is a poet of rhetoric and ethnography, and he brings “outsider” linguistic perspectives to his writing. His verse speaks to the contemporary “post”-Xicano experience, amid current immigration debates that touch so many lives in the United States beyond the Southwest borderlands in the twenty-first century. Steven's aesthetic reflects the synergy that composes hyphenated American identities, and what he deems as his Neo-Baroque Xicano experimentalism. Conflicts and congruencies of languages make for innovative poetry, which Steven picked up on after intensive independent study in the interlinguistic poetics of the OuLipo group, and masters such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Carlos Fuentes, Charles Olson, and the Chican@ poets, especially Eduardo Corral and Alberto Baltazar Urista Heredia (Alurista). Steven's first novel The Pocho Codex: Piercing an Amurkan Poetic Historiography (Editorial Paroxismo, 2011) and its prequel The Xicano Genome: Ulises, Los Panchos, e Ysrael (Editorial Paroxismo, 2012) incorporate much from these influences. His poems have also appeared in Fence, Drunken Boat, Blue Mesa Review, EAOGH, Shampoo, and Acentos Review. In 2008, his poem “& So Tio & Chaley” was recognized by the Poetry Society of America as one of the best poems about Times Square. For more of his work, visit www.stevenpaulalvarez.com and follow him on Twitter @chastitellez and Instagram @stevenpaulalvarez.

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