Gessy Alvarez is a writer, editor, and publisher. She is the publisher of Digging Press, series editor of the Digging Press Chapbook Series, and editor-in-chief of Digging Through The Fat: a journal for cultural omnivores. Her recent projects include the novel Last Kingdom in Astoria and the short story collection Love the Abyss (née Taste the World on Your Skin), a finalist for the Katharine Porter Prize (University of North Texas Press, 2018) and a semi-finalist for the Black Lawrence Hudson Prize (2022). Both projects explore characters living between languages, traditions, and cultures, side-stepping around the meanings of home, origin, and fate. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Acentos Review, Hobart, Asteri(x), Volume One Brooklyn, Feminine Collective, and other publications. She hosts the literary podcast Digging Through with Gessy Alvarez and The Lit Revue: a reading and music series in Room 31 at Arlo NoMad Hotel in New York City. She earned an MFA from Columbia University and has received support from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Millay Colony for the Arts, where she was a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow. You can find out more about her work at GessyAlvarez.com and DiggingPress.com.

Gessy was born in New York City, the daughter of an Ecuadorian mother and Dominican father. She works in NYC and Bergen County, NJ.