Julia Alvarez
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Julia Alvarez (born March 27, 1950) is a poet, novelist, and essayist. Born in New York, her parents returned to their native Dominican Republic when she was three months of age and raised her there until she was ten.
In 1960, the family fled back to the United States, after her father participated in the underground against the military dictator, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. Three months later the leaders of the underground railroad, the Mirabal sisters, were murdered. She based her second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, on those murders. It was subsequently made into a film produced by Salma Hayek. She is currently writer-in-residence at Middlebury College and the owner of a coffee farm named Alta Gracia, near Jarabacoa in the mountains of the Dominican Republic. The farm hosts a DREAM school to teach local farmers and their families how to read and write.
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[edit] Education
Alvarez graduated from Abbot Academy in 1967. She attended Middlebury College in 1971, after transferring from Connecticut College, which she attended from 1967 to 1969. She received her Masters in Creative Writing from Syracuse University in 1975.
[edit] Teaching career
Alvarez was a poet in the schools for the Kentucky Arts Commission from 1975 to 1977. In that capacity she visited elementary schools, high schools, colleges and communities throughout the state conducting writing workshops and giving readings. Alvarez was told by her parents ,before their deaths, that she would be better off as a lawyer but she followed her passion of the literary arts.
In 1978, she served in the same capacity with senior citizens in Fayetteville, North Carolina, under the aegis of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Arts Council of Fayetteville. This project produced an anthology, Old Age Ain't For Sissies. She also conducted workshops in English and Spanish at Mary Williams Elementary School in Wilmington, Delaware sponsored by the Delaware Arts Council and the Wilmington School District. This project produced an anthology, Yo Soy/I Am.
Alvarez taught English and creative writing at California State University, Fresno, College of the Sequoias, Phillips Andover Academy, University of Vermont, George Washington University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before coming to Middlebury College as an assistant professor in 1988. She was promoted to full professor in 1996 and resigned her tenured position to write full time in 1998. The college created the position of writer-in-residence for her, where she continues to teach creative writing on a part-time basis, advise Latino students, and serve as an outside reader for creative writing theses by English majors.
[edit] Grants and honors
Alvarez has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents was the winner of the 1991 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for works which present a multicultural viewpoint. Some of her poetry manuscripts now have a permanent home in the New York Public Library, where she was featured in an exhibit, “The Hand of the Poet: Original Manuscripts by 100 Masters, From John Donne to Julia Alvarez."
[edit] Bibliography
- Homecoming (1984) (poetry)
- How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) (fiction)
- In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) (fiction)
- The Other Side (El Otro Lado) (1995) (poetry)
- Homecoming:New and Selected Poems (1996) (poetry) a reissue of '84 volume with new poems
- ¡Yo! (1997) (fiction)
- Something to Declare (1998) (collected essays)
- Seven Trees (1998) (poetry)
- In the Name of Salomé (2000) (fiction)
- The Secret Footprints (2001) (fiction)
- How Tia Lola Came to
visitStay (2001) (fiction) - A Cafecito Story (2001) (fiction)
- Before We Were Free (2002) (fiction)
- The Woman I Kept to Myself (2004) (poetry)
- finding miracles (2004) (fiction)
- Gift of Gracias: The Legend of Altagracia (2004) (children's book)
- Saving the World (2006) (fiction)
- Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA (2007) (nonfiction)
[edit] See also
[edit] Further reading
- Dalleo, Raphael, and Elena Machado Sáez. "Writing in a Minor Key: Postcolonial and Post-Civil Rights Histories in the Novels of Julia Álvarez." The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. pp. 133–158. www.post-sixties.com
- Henao, Eda B. The colonial subject's search for nation, culture, and identity in the works of Julia Alvarez, Rosario Ferré, and Ana Lydia Vega. Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 2004.
- Johnson, Kelli Lyon. Julia Alvarez: Writing a New Place on the Map. University of New Mexico Press, 2005.
- Mujčinović, Fatima. Postmodern cross-culturalism and politicization in U.S. Latina literature: from Ana Castillo to Julia Alvarez. New York: P. Lang, 2004.
- Sirias, Silvio. Julia Alvarez: a critical companion. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001.
