Poem of the Day

Nina and fellow writers Sandy Farnan and Raquel Pidal co-publish the monthly e-magazine “Follow Your Bliss,” offering advice and insights on doing what you love or loving what you do.

After spending a semester at the University of Cape Town in 2001, she wrote her master’s thesis “Apocalypse is Genesis: Homi Bhabha and the Third Space of South African Culture,” combining creative nonfiction, memoir, and criticism to explore South African literature using post-colonial, materialist, and post-structuralist methodologies.

From 2002-2005 she taught college-level composition and literature at Finger Lakes Community College and Monroe Community College, where she won an internship for talented teachers. From 2005-2007 she worked as a freelance copyeditor, copywriter, and graphic designer in Philadelphia, PA.

Nina spent the summer of 2008 traveling in Argentina, the UK, Denmark, Germany, and France and the summer of 2009 in Philadelphia.

She continues to work with clients, write teleplays, novellas, poems, short stories, personal essay, and recently moved back to her hometown in Upstate New York.

My Life 

I earned my MA in English from the University at Albany in my early 20s and immediately began teaching as an adjunct English instructor at Finger Lakes Community College and Monroe Community College. Although I found teaching very rewarding and even received the Alice H. Young Internship for talented teachers at MCC, in 2005 I ‘inherited’ a small publishing company and decided to leave teaching for a while and learn about the business of books.

I taught myself how to run a small publishing company and to support it and myself with copywriting, copyediting, marketing, and design work for corporations and nonprofits. I worked for two years in Philadelphia freelancing for Aramark, the Project Management Institute, and for the Education Testing System, helping shape up GREs and SATs. Around this time I started a poetry website (ninaalvarez.net) celebrating my favorite poets which has now garnered over 100,000 hits and routinely ignites literary discussion. My love of literary scholarship has never been far behind me.

And neither was my love for the arts. In 2006 I began a blog about the process of making and selling art in Philadelphia (filthyart.wordpress.com) and this lead to a job as a professional blogger and editor for Artspan, a company that helps artists market their work through websites. I traveled Europe, visiting art museums and galleries in Paris, London, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Munich and studying through books and online the grassroots ways for artists to promote themselves. I found that I was most inspired when there was a teaching/mentoring aspect to my work and that continued on when I started getting approached by writers who wanted me to edit their manuscripts.

I transitioned over from working with artists to working with writers and thinkers: as a manuscript editor and as a ghostwriter. I helped clients through months of revisions as a writing mentor as much as an editor. I even wrote query letters and guided clients through the agent submission process. During 2010, two other writers and I started writing and editing an emagazine on how to achieve well-being through one’s work called Follow Your Bliss. Again, the desire to teach, instruct, and share came up through many of my articles.

Upon returning to my hometown of Rochester in January 2011, I continued working as a freelance editor, publisher, and ghostwriter, but felt the community aspect of my work was missing. It all came together when I attending the Vermont Studio Center as a writing resident in May 2011. When I returned to Rochester, I started teaching writing workshops at Writers and Books, sharing some of the industry knowledge I had gained. Now I am developing online writing workshops and one-on-one writing mentoring through skype.