Julia Alvarez

Dominican-American · born 1950

Born in New York City on March 27, 1950, to Dominican parents who carried her back to the island soon afterward, Julia Alvarez spent her first ten years in the Dominican Republic among a large extended family. In 1960 her father's part in a failed plot against the dictator Rafael Trujillo forced them to flee to New York. She arrived at ten in the city of her own birth with almost no English, and the shock of that crossing, out of a walled world of aunts and cousins into an apartment where she was suddenly foreign, became the material she worked for the rest of her life. She was sent to boarding school at Abbot Academy at thirteen, studied at Connecticut College and then Middlebury College, where she took her degree summa cum laude in 1971, and completed a master's at Syracuse University in 1975. For the next decade she moved between residencies, teaching poetry in schools and communities in Kentucky and elsewhere, before a visiting post at the University of Vermont and a long association with Middlebury as writer in residence. Her first book was a poetry collection, Homecoming (1984). How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), fifteen linked stories told in reverse chronology, made her reputation. In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) turned to the Mirabal sisters, murdered by Trujillo's regime in 1960, and became her most widely taught novel. Yo! followed in 1997, the essays of Something to Declare in 1998, and In the Name of Salome in 2000. In 1996 she and her husband Bill Eichner bought land in the Dominican Republic and founded Alta Gracia, an organic coffee farm with a literacy school attached. She received the National Medal of Arts in 2014. Afterlife appeared in 2020 and The Cemetery of Untold Stories in 2024.