Julia Alvarez

Julia Alvarez (born March 27, 1950, New York City, New York, U.S.) is a Dominican-American author and educator best known for her novels, short stories, and poems for adults and young people. Many of her works have been published in both Spanish and English and blend Latin American history, autobiography, magic realism, and folklore.

Background and teaching career

Alvarez was born in New York City to political exiles from the Dominican Republic. When she was a few months old, she moved to that country with her father, Eduardo Alvarez Perello, and her mother, Julia Tavares Espaillat. There her father joined an underground group that opposed the dictatorship of the country’s leader, Rafael Trujillo. However, in 1960, after her father came under suspicion of working to overthrow the regime, she and the rest of her family hastily moved back to the United States. In high school young Alvarez developed a passion for writing. She spent two years at Connecticut College before transferring to Vermont’s Middlebury College, from which she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1971. In 1975 she earned a master’s degree in creative writing from Syracuse University in New York.

Alvarez began her career as a writer in residence, leading writing workshops in various settings, including colleges, elementary schools, and nursing homes. She also taught English at colleges and at a private boarding school, and in 1986 she became an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. From 1988 to 1998 Alvarez taught English and creative writing at Middlebury, where she became a full professor in 1996. Since 1998 she has served there part-time as a writer in residence.

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Works for adults

Alvarez wrote stories for many years before her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, was published in 1991. The book centers on four sisters as they deal with growing up in a new cultural environment and includes experiences from her own life. Alvarez’s second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), is a fictional account of the lives of the Dominican Mirabal sisters, who were involved in the underground movement to overthrow Trujillo and his government. In 2001 it was adapted into a TV movie starring Salma Hayek. Alvarez’s other novels include In the Name of Salomé (2000), Saving the World (2006), and Afterlife (2020). In The Cemetery of Untold Stories (2024) the characters in a writer’s buried manuscript come to life and attempt to rewrite their stories.

Alvarez has also written poetry, including that collected in The Other Side (1995) and The Woman I Kept to Myself (2004). In 2026 she published Visitations, a collection of poems about childhood, family, aging, and love.

Her nonfiction books include Something to Declare: Essays (1998), Once upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA (2007), and A Wedding in Haiti: The Story of a Friendship (2012).

Children’s books

Many of Alvarez’s children’s books are retellings of stories she heard in the Dominican Republic. For example, The Secret Footprints (2000) is a picture book that embellishes on a Dominican fairy tale about beautiful women who live underwater and come out only at night. The Best Gift of All: The Legend of La Vieja Belén (2008) relates the legend of an old Dominican woman who bestows gifts on the poor. Some of Alvarez’s stories, including Finding Miracles (2004), are about people who have moved to the United States from other countries. She has also written about political and social problems in a way that young readers can understand. Before We Were Free (2002) relates the story of a young girl living under a dictatorship in Latin America, and Return to Sender (2009) tells of Mexican migrant workers in the United States. Alvarez’s later books for children include Where Do They Go? (2016), an exploration of death in verse, and Already a Butterfly (2020), an investigation of the importance of self-reflection and meditation.

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Honors, personal life, and projects

Alvarez has been the recipient of several prestigious honors, including the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature in 2009. U.S. Pres. Barack Obama awarded her the National Medal of Arts in 2013.

In 1989 Alvarez married ophthalmologist Bill Eichner. Several years later the couple founded Finca Alta Gracia, a coffee farm and literacy center in the Dominican highlands. In 2001 they published the novella A Cafecito Story. Their friendship with a Haitian teenager who began working on the farm inspired the book A Wedding in Haiti and the founding of Border of Lights, a nonprofit organization that works for peace in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Other writers involved in the nonprofit include Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat and American poet Rita Dove.

Alvarez is also an honorary chair of the Mariposa DR Foundation, which promotes the education and empowerment of girls in Latin America and the Caribbean.