Saylín Álvarez Oquendo

Spring 2025 Office Hours

coming in late January

Education

PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Licenciatura, Universidad de La Habana, Cuba

Awards

2022-23. Committed to Change Grant (UW-Madison Language Institute)

2022. Grant to Support Innovation in Language Teaching and Learning (UW-Madison Language Institute)

Digital Projects

Voces Video Interview Series
This video series addresses topics of representation in Spanish language classes and gives the word to a group of UW-Madison students from the Black, Latine, LGBTQ+, and non-binary communities. They express their views on the content of language courses as it pertains to their diverse identities and experiences. The videos also feature interviews with instructors and advisors, who share their teaching approaches or mentoring work, in a continuous dialogue on how to promote more inclusive practices in language teaching.

Bilingual Children’s Books Digital Library
This digital library features children’s books in Spanish and English written by a group of UW-Madison students enrolled in several Spanish 311 courses. The stories were created as part of a class writing project that asked the participants to think about our communities, and specifically about ways in which, through creative writing, they could inspire, empower, educate, or just pass down their experiences and thoughts to younger kids during the remarkably difficult year that was 2020 and its aftermath.

Community

Saylín Álvarez has worked extensively with cartoneras, small alternative publishers that produce low-cost, handcrafted books using recycled cardboard. Following in the footsteps of these Latin American book presses, in 2010 she co-founded Kutsemba Cartão, a cardboard-cover publisher and socio-cultural project in Maputo, Mozambique. Upon returning to Madison, she developed multidisciplinary projects combining writing, editing, painting, and bookmaking, and she worked with different classes at UW-Madison, with students at the Residencia de Estudiantes (Department of Spanish & Portuguese) and at Marquette University.

She also led a semester-length project on cartoneras at Cherokee Middle School as a UW-Madison Public Humanities Exchange Scholar. She has organized presentations and book painting workshops at elementary schools and high schools in the Madison area, and she has collaborated in cardboard book exhibits at Madison Central Library and UW-Memorial Library.

She was the editor-in-chief of the publishing project Health Education and Well-being and Traditional Kenyan Tales, an initiative of the UW-Madison based NGO Nikumbuke-Health by Motorbike, which delivers basic health education, services, and equipment to mobile clinics for women, adolescent girls, and children in remote areas of Kenya. Numerous carboard cover books (libros cartoneros) edited by Saylín Álvarez in Mozambique with Kutsemba Cartão, and in Madison with Nikumbuke-Health by Motorbike are now part of the cartonera collection held by UW-Madison Memorial Library’s Ibero-American collection (“one of the largest and most comprehensive collections in the US”).