Cleyvis Natera is an immigrant from the Dominican Republic. She arrived in New York City at 10 years old with her mother and siblings and has made the United States her home. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Skidmore College and a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from New York University. She is a recipient of the 2019 Carol Houck Smith Returning Contributor Award in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a fiction fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA). Cleyvis received merit based writing scholarships to the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the VONA Voices Foundation. Cleyvis is hard at work on her first novel, “Neruda on the Park.” She currently lives in Montclair, NJ with her husband and two young children. She is a 2019-2020 PEN America Writing For Justice Fellow.
