“I was forty-one with twenty-plus years of writing behind me. The same year she earned tenure at Middlebury College, she published her first novel, How The García Girls Lost Their Accents, the first major novel written in English by a Dominican author. First she taught high school, then college, and finally took a tenure track teaching position at Middlebury College. At first, she traveled around teaching, (what she called being a “migrant writer”), but finally she decided to put down roots. In order to make a living, Alvarez became a teacher, mostly of creative writing. But I kept writing, knowing that this was what was in me to do. Writing which focused on the lives of non-white, non mainstream characters was considered of ethnic interest only, the province of sociology. Latino literature or writers were unheard of. Afro-American writers were just beginning to gain admission into the canon. It took coming to this country for reading and writing to become allied in my mind with storytelling.Īll through high school, college, and then a graduate program in creative writing, Alvarez knew she wanted to be a writer.īut it was the late sixties, early seventies. Since ours was an oral culture, stories were not written down.
As a kid, I loved stories, hearing them, telling them. Lying, they called it back then.) But they’re right. and they’ll tell you I was making up stuff way before I ever set foot in the United States of America. Of course, autobiographies are written afterwards. I also discovered the welcoming world of the imagination and books. Not understanding the language, I had to pay close attention to each word - great training for a writer. When I’m asked what made me into a writer, I point to the watershed experience of coming to this country. until Alvarez was 10 years old, although she continued to spend summers in the Dominican Republic. Three months later, her parents returned to their native Dominican Republic. She was born in New York City on March 17, 1950, the second of four daughters. Julia Alvarez is a Dominican-American poet, novelist, and essayist. Photo of Julia Alvarez from Interview with LaBloga Her work has garnered wide recognition, including a Latina Leader Award in Literature from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature, the Woman of the Year by Latina magazine, and inclusion in the New York Public Library’s program “The Hand of the Poet: Original Manuscripts by 100 Masters, from John Donne to Julia Alvarez.” In the Time of the Butterflies, with over one million copies in print, was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its national Big Read program, and in 2013 President Obama awarded Alvarez the National Medal of Arts in recognition of her extraordinary storytelling.Because we got a late start for Hispanic Heritage Month, (it actually started September 15), we are going to spend this whole week, the final week of this particular celebration, featuring Hispanic authors, scholars, educators, and speakers. Next week we’ll get back to celebrating LGBT and Philipino American History. She has taught and mentored writers in schools and communities across America and, until her retirement in 2016, was a writer in residence at Middlebury College. She is the author of six novels, three books of nonfiction, three collections of poetry, and eleven books for children and young adults.
Julia Alvarez left the Dominican Republic for the United States in 1960 at the age of ten.
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