Melissa Alvarado Sierra writes about the Puerto Rican experience. Her fiction and nonfiction work has been published or is forthcoming in The New York Times, ZORA, Catapult, Orion, The Caribbean Writer, The Puerto Rico Review, and elsewhere. She wrote a chapter about environmental justice in Vieques, Puerto Rico for the book The World We Need (The New Press 2021) and her book, La narrativa activista de Rosario Ferré (McGraw-Hill 2020), about literature as activism, dissects the themes of magical realism, feminism and national identity in the work of the Puerto Rican writer. Melissa is the 2020–2022 Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project teaching fellow. She's currently writing a memoir.