Julia Alvarez

Place of Birth: New York

Birth Date: March 27, 1950

Autobiographical Statement:
I always say that I would never have become a writer unless I had come to the United States at the age of ten. Oddly enough, I was born in New York City during my parents’ first and failed emigration to the States. They returned to their homeland when I was three months old. I grew up in the Dominican Republic in the 1950s during a dangerous and bloody dictatorship. My family didn’t own many books. In fact, I hardly ever saw anyone reading. Books were not only ignored, they were considered dangerous. In a dictatorship where every word was censored, people were careful not to give the wrong impression. To be caught reading was to be branded an intellectual, a troublemaker. Although I did not grow up among books or readers, I did grow up in an oral culture where storytelling was a high art. My family was full of great storytellers, vying for the limelight at the big, midday meal where the extended family came together to nurture each other with food and stories.

My exposure to books did not happen until our immigration to New York City. In August 1960, my father’s participation in an underground group of freedom fighters was discovered and we were forced to flee. Overnight, we lost everything -- our country, our home, our extended family structure, our economic security, our language. We became "spics" with no money or prospects. We arrived in this country at a time in history that was not very welcoming to people who were different, whose skins were a different color, whose language didn’t sound like English. I struggled with a language and a culture I didn’t understand.

Homesick and lonely, I soon discovered a refuge. Between the covers of books, I found what I had been looking for on the streets and playgrounds of the U.S.A. A portable homeland where I belonged, where my spirit was free to soar. I became a reader. Soon, I began to dream that maybe I, too, could create worlds where no one would be barred. But that dream of becoming a writer required hard work. When I started writing, none of the great classics I read in school were written by anyone like me. How could a Dominican girl with Spanish as her first language ever become an American writer?

But I was forgetting something. We had arrived with only four suitcases, but there were hundreds of stories in my head and a passion for storytelling in my heart. And so I kept writing. The books I read encouraged me. "I’m nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us." (Emily Dickinson) Another message read: "I, too sing America. I am the darker brother." (Langston Hughes) These words were secret handshakes being passed around an underground of book-and-freedom lovers. We are free spirits. Please pass on this important message! Finally in 1991, when I was 41 years old, after over twenty years of writing with no success, my first novel, How the García Girls Lost their Accents, was published. My bottle had finally been found on the shore! I had passed on my own words to others.

As for writing for younger readers? I became interested in children’s literature when my husband and I started a sustainable farming project in the mountains of the Dominican Republic. When we discovered that over 95% of our neighbors did not know how to read or write, we decided to open a school and a small library on the farm. At Alta Gracia (as we named the farm and literacy center), we used children’s books to teach literacy. I began to read a lot of literature for young readers. I discovered a dearth of books dealing with the stories I had heard as a young girl in the Dominican Republic and with the histories, tragedies and triumphs of our countries south of the U.S.A. border. My first picture book, The Secret Footprints, was based on the legend of the ciguapas which my mountain neighbors at Alta Gracia all know by heart.

Knowing by heart is always my first step as a writer. But the message has to be put down on paper and inserted in a capsule that can weather the seas of time. My hope is that the books I write will reach readers with that important, implicit message of the best literature: We all belong.

Profile:
Although Julia Alvarez was born in New York City, her physician father moved the family to the Dominican Republic shortly after her birth. Ties to the U.S., however, remained strong in a family where all her uncles had attended Ivy League colleges and her grandfather was a cultural attaché to the United Nations. Even while she lived in the Dominican, Alvarez dressed like an American, went to an American school, and spent much of her day speaking and reading English. In 1960, her father's involvement with an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Trujillo dictatorship forced the family to emigrate back to New York, though by the time she was fifteen, Alvarez and her sisters were returning to the Dominican Republic every summer.

After her move to the U.S., Alvarez attended private school and, in 1967, enrolled at Connecticut College. After two years she transferred to Middlebury College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and received her B.A. in 1971. Her M.A. in creative writing was granted by Syracuse University in 1975. Pursuing an academic career in conjunction with her writing, Alvarez has taught English and writing at Phillips Andover Academy, the University of Vermont, George Washington University, the University of Illinois, and at Middlebury, where she became a tenured professor in 1991. She resigned her professorship in 1998 to teach part-time as a writer-in-residence.

Alvarez’s first adult novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, tells the story of four sisters who, like the author and her family, emigrated to New York from the Dominican Republic and struggled to find an identity between two disparate cultures. The same characters appear in her 1997 novel ¡Yo!. In the Time of the Butterflies, which also draws on her Latina roots as well as on her father’s revolutionary involvement, was named an American Library Association Notable Book and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Alvarez writes in a variety of genres and has published essays, stories, and poems in The New York Times Magazine, Allure, The New Yorker, Hispanic Magazine, Latina, USA Weekend, The Washington Post Magazine, and The American Scholar, among others.

All three of Alvarez’s children’s books have been cited by the New York Public Library on its annual list, "One Hundred Titles for Reading and Sharing." How Tía Lola Came to (Visit) Stay was named a Child Magazine Best Children’s Book and a Parent’s Guide to Children’s Media Outstanding Book for 2001. Before We Were Free, a novel that tells the story from a child's point of view of a family's involvement in the plot to overthrow Trujillo, was designated an ALA Notable Children’s Book as well as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults.

Selected Works for Young Readers:
The Secret Footprints, illus. by Fabian Negrin, 2000; How Tía Lola Came to (Visit) Stay, 2001; Before We Were Free, 2002.

Selected Works for Adults:
The Housekeeping Book, 1984; How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, 1991; In the Time of the Butterflies, 1994; The Other Side: El Otro Lado, 1996; 1994; Homecoming: New and Collected Poems, 1996; ¡Yo!, 1997; Something to Declare: Essays, 1998; Seven Trees, 1999; In the Name of Salomé, 2000; A Cafecito Story, 2001.

Suggested Reading:
Something About the Author, Vol. 129, 2002; Contemporary Authors, Vol. 101; Dictionary of Hispanic Biography, 1995; Notable Hispanic American Women, 1998; Bing, Jonathan, "Julia Alvarez: Books that Cross Borders," Publishers Weekly, December 16, 1996; Prescott, Stephanie, "Julia Alvarez: Dominican American Storyteller," Faces: People, Places, and Cultures, February, 1999; Jacques, Ben, "Julia Alvarez: Real Flights of Imagination," Americas, January 2001; Alvarez, Julia, "Place of a Lifetime: Dominican Republic," National Geographic Traveler, October, 2002.