Christina Olivares, Ph.D., is an author, scholar and educator. She is the author of the books of poetry FUTURE BOTANIC (Get Fresh Books, 2023), NO MAP OF THE EARTH INCLUDES STARS (winner of the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press Book Prize), and the chaplet INTERRUPT (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2015).
Olivares’ research explores the literacy practices of young LGBTQIA++ people of color, critical and third space methodologies, and youth-authored pedagogies in order to better understand how education is and can be de-institutionalized; discourses of giftedness, access and attainment in higher education; and poetry pedagogy. Olivares has presented her work as an American Educational Research Association (AERA) invited guest of the Critical Posthuman and Postfoundational Studies in Education SIG and several times at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). Olivares presented her dissertation research, which was awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Grant at Teachers College, as a Research-In-Progress Roundtable at AERA in 2025. Olivares was awarded a Point Foundation Fellowship and Teachers College Diversity Grants to support her doctoral study, was a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship Finalist, and received a grant from Duke University’s Rubenstein Library to support research on queerness and pedagogy in Duke’s archives.
Olivares has performed and published widely, notably recently by The Academy of American Poets and in "Working Intersections" at Lincoln Center. In 2020, her videopoem "Diagnosis" was published by The Poetry Project alongside those of las Tetas, an ephemeral collaboration of latinx/e poets living in NYC during the first pandemic waves; in 2019, Lambda Literary published an interview between Mahogany L. Browne and Olivares about Audre Lorde's legacy and archives, following Olivares’ 2018 essay exploring Lorde’s archives in Makhzin. In 2019, a selection from No Map of the Earth Includes Stars was used to anchor the digital choreopoem-essay ".break .dance" by Marisa Parham, which was published by small axe (sx archipelagos, Issue 3). Olivares is a finalist for the NYFA Grant in Poetry, the recipient of BRIO Nonfiction and Poetry Grants, a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Residency, and two Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grants. In 2019, Olivares was an inaugural AAWW Witness Fellow, studying and writing on incarceration and deportation.
Olivares is a full-time high school educator and administrator, and has taught as a visiting professor at the Rutgers-Newark MFA poetry program, in the St. Joseph’s University MFA poetry program, at Teachers College at Columbia University, and at community-based workshops through the Bronx Council on the Arts and Mission Belonging. Since 2021, she has written discussion guides for Random House young adult novels. Olivares is a poverty and prison abolitionist and is proud to be from the Bronx. Olivares identifies as queer and American-Cuban.