She is the recipient of grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, The Jim Henson Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer, Franklin Furnace and a New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award. Alva was chosen to participate in the 2011 Hedgebrook Women Playwrights Festival. The Joseph Papp Public Theater, Spoleto Festival, USA, The Kitchen, Dixon Place and Heather Henson’s Handmade Puppet Films have commissioned her work. Readings and productions have been presented by the aforementioned theaters, as well as HERE, Actor’s Express Theater, New Georges, The Women’s Project, Trinity Repertory Theater, Seattle Repertory Theater, The Walker Art Center, P.S. 122, The New Museum, Pillsbury House Theater, The O’Neill Puppetry Conference and the American Museum of Natural History.

Collaborators include Heather Henson, Lisa Jones, Whitfield Lovell, Butch Morris, Vernon Reid, Elliot Sharp, Lorna Simpson, Urban Bush Women, Kara Walker and Fred Wilson. She was a founding member of the High Fidelity Performance Troupe, Rodeo Caldonia and an original member of the Band of Susans. She has an ongoing collaboration with Seattle based composer, Bruce Monroe.

Alva holds a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Brown University and an MFA in Musical Theater Writing from New York University.