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Author profile of Julia Alvarez.

Julia Alvarez was born in New York City on March 27, 1950. She is a Dominican-American poet, author, novelist, and essayist. Alvarez stayed in Dominican Republic for ten years of her childhood. She had a hard time to adjust to the Immigrant life where she had to learn a new Language; English and adapt into a new culture. It brought homesick since they experienced a lot of alienation and prejudice from the natives. She quoted about language that was everything; a home. She said that, "Language is the only homeland, Czeslow Milosz once observed, and indeed, English, not the United States, was where I landed and sunk deep roots."

Alvarez wrote several novels that were critical to her prominence at international levels. She published her first novel in 1991 that was entitled How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. She also wrote In The Times of the Butterflies in 1994 as her second novel. Several of the poet publications included the Homecoming of 1984, The Woman I Kept to Myself in 2004 and one of her essays was the Something to Declare in 1998. All her works have made her as one of the significant Latina writers thus achieving critical and commercial international success.

Due to Alvarez’s experience in the Dominican in the United States, she focused on the themes of alienation, search for identity, displacement, and assimilation. The combination of her personal and political tone is due to her cultural upbringing as both an American and a Dominican. She was raised in a foreign land with also a foreign culture. It was through writing that Alvarez found refuge in the writing. Alvarez used words to build her own world which were critical in revealing and transcending the meaning of life. She was recognized as a significant voice in the American literature (Alvarez, 1987).

Out of her several interviews, she was asked the reason behind writing In The Times of the Butterflies in 1994. She said that "being a survivor placed a responsibility on me to tell the story of these brave young women who did not survive the dictatorship." The novel is a fictional story of the murder of the Mirabal sisters. The novel is a testament for the remarkable women that fought the injustice that was then in America (Heredia, 2000).  The novel led to the National Book Critics Circle Award where it was chosen as the Best Books for Young Adults by the Young Adult Library Services Association and the American Library Association in 1995. Other awards that Alvarez received included the Benjamin T. Marshall Poetry Prize, General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers, (1986), Woman of the Year in 2000 and the Literature Leadership Award among others.

It is notable that Alvarez taught at Middlebury College for ten years as a professor from 1988 to 1998. She was later married to Bill Eichner, who was an ophthalmologist from Nebraska. They own a coffee bean near Jarabacoa City in the Dominican Republic Mountains in which most of the sales proceeds are utilized in the support of the Foundation Alta Gracia to help educate natives and foreign students.

The photo below was taken at a time when Alvarez was discussing her then latest work, In the Name of Salome which is a portrait of the retired librarian voices who had an invigorated view of life due to the memories of Fidel Castro power. There was a struggle of choice between retiring in Florida and moving to Havanna (Alvarez, 2000).

References

Alvarez, J. (1987). An American Childhood in the Dominican Republic. The American Scholar, 71-85.

Alvarez, J. (2000). From in the Name of Salomé. Callaloo, 828-838.

Heredia, J. (2000). Latina self-portraits: Interviews with contemporary women writers. UNM Press.