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Although Julia Alvarez was born in New York City, she lived in the Dominican Republic until she was ten years old. She returned to New York after her father, a physician, was connected to a plot to overthrow the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, and the family had to flee. Growing up in Queens was radically different from the Latino Caribbean world she experienced during her early childhood. A new culture and new language sensitized Alvarez to her surroundings and her use of language so that emigration from the Dominican Republic to Queens was the beginning of her movement toward becoming a writer. Her fascination with English continued into high school and took shape in college as she became a serious writer—first at Connecticut College from 1967 to 1969 and then at Middlebury College, where she earned her B.A. in 1971. At Syracuse University she was awarded the American Academy of Poetry Prize and, in 1975, earned an M.F.A. in creative writing. Since then she has worked as a writer-in-residence for the Kentucky Arts Commission, the Delaware Arts Council, and the Arts Council of Fayetteville, North Carolina, working in schools and community organizations. She has taught at California State College, College of Sequoias, Phillips Andover Academy, the University of Vermont, George Washington University, the University of Illinois, and, since 1988, at Middlebury College where she is a professor of literature and creative writing. Alvarez has had essays, stories and poems published in The New Yorker, Allure, Mirabella, The New York Times Magazine, Hispanic Magazine, The Kenyon Review and USA Weekend. Her book of poems, Homecoming (1984; second edition, 1986), uses simple—yet incisive— language to explore issues related to love, domestic life, and work. Her second book of poetry, The Other Side/El Otro Lado (1995), is a bilingual collection of meditations on her childhood memories of immigrant life that served to shape her adult identity and sensibilities. In addition to her two volumes of poetry, Alvarez has also published three novels. The first, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), is a collection of fifteen separate but interrelated stories that cover thirty years of the lives of the García sisters from the late 1950s to the late 1980s. Drawing upon her own experiences, Alvarez describes the sisters fleeing the Dominican Republic and growing up as Latinas in the United States as well as their relationship to the country they left behind. Alvarez’s second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), is a fictional account of a true story concerning four sisters who opposed Trujillo’s dictatorship. Three of the sisters were murdered in 1960 by the government, and the fourth surviving sister recounts the events of their personal and political lives that led up to her sisters’ deaths. Shaped by the history of Dominican freedom and tyranny, the novel also explores the sisters’ relationships to each other and their country. In ¡Yo! (1997), her third novel, Alvarez focuses on Yolanda, one of the García sisters from her first novel, who is now a writer. Written in the different voices of Yo’s friends and family members, this fractured narrative constructs a complete picture of a woman who uses her relationships as fodder for fiction; a woman who is selfish, aggravating, and finally lovable and who is deeply embedded in American culture while remaining aware of her Dominican roots. Something to Declare, a collection of previously published essays, was published in 1998.
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