Author Julia Alvarez

This fall as part of orientation, new students will participate in discussions of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991), Julia Alvarez's best-known novel and winner of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award. Over the summer, the College sent the book to all entering students as part of a "common read" program. The new students and the entire College community will have the opportunity to hear what Alvarez has to say in person, when she gives a reading on campus Friday, September 7, at 7 pm, in Pratt Hall's McCulloch Auditorium. During her visit, she will also meet with small groups of new students.

Commenting on the place of the "common read" within the orientation program, Rochelle Calhoun, associate dean of the College, says, "A major goal of the orientation program is to assist new students with their entrance into the MHC community. Creating common experiences is one of the ways that we encourage a positive transition. The common read enables new students to discover connections with other students and to the intellectual life of the campus. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents touches on themes that we hope to use to help new students examine their own transition from home to college, family to community, and dependence to independence and interdependence."

About Julia Alvarez
Raised in the Dominican Republic until the age of ten, Julia Alvarez and her family emigrated to the United States in 1960, a move prompted by her father's involvement in a failed coup against the Trujillo dictatorship. Transplantation to America was critical to Alvarez's personal and literary development. Says the author, "I came into English as a ten-year old from the Dominican Republic, and I consider this radical uprooting from my culture, my native language, my country, the reason I began writing." Themes surrounding immigration, exile, native and ethnic cultures, and the search for identity are prominent in her writing.

A lover of stories from the time she was a young child, Alvarez knew she wanted to be a writer by the time she was in high school. She studied literature and writing at Middlebury College, graduating summa cum laude in 1971. In describing her college experience, she has said, "When I went to college, we read a little Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson. Like that was really going to help me, a Latina woman. . . . I thought I had to write like them in order to be a writer in English. I didn't know you could put amorcito in a story in English." In 1975, Alvarez received an M.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University.

After completing her graduate studies, Alvarez was hired by the Kentucky Arts Commission to be one of three poets in the state's poetry-in-the-schools programs (1975–1977). She traveled extensively throughout the state, conducting workshops in schools, prisons, and nursing homes. She went on to do pilot projects with the National Endowment for the Arts in a bilingual program in Delaware (1978) and a senior-citizen program in North Carolina (1978), while writing poems, publishing them in small magazines, and giving readings. In 1979, Alvarez was the John Atherton Scholar in Poetry at the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and was a fellow there in both poetry (1986) and fiction (1987). She is now a member of Bread Loaf's rotating staff. While devoting herself to writing, Alvarez has also had an active career as a teacher of English and creative writing, at Phillips Andover Academy (1979–81), the University of Vermont (1981–1983), George Washington University (as the Jenny McKean Moore Fellow, 1984–1985), and the University of Illinois (1985–1988). Since 1988 she has taught at Middlebury College where she is a member of the English department.

A poet as well as a novelist, Alvarez published Homecoming, her first book of poems, in 1984. Her other collections of poetry are The Housekeeping Book (1994), The Other Side: El Otro Lado (1995), and Homecoming: New and Collected Poems (1996). Although poetry was her first love, Alvarez also found success writing prose. Her first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, was published in 1991. It tells the story of four sisters, Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía Garcia, who move to New York City in 1960 from the Dominican Republic. Fifteen interconnected stories, which transcend time by shifting between present and past, convey the Garcia sisters' struggles to forge identities that reconcile the two cultures of which they are a part. Along the way, Alvarez conveys joy, pathos, humor, and the power of memory.

In the Time of the Butterflies, an American Library Association Notable Book and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, followed four years later. A historical novel, the book's subject is the legendary Mirabal sisters, known as Las Mariposas (The Butterflies), who died fighting an oppressive dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. Alvarez focuses on the Garcia sisters once again in Yo!, the sequel to the Garcia Girls (1997). A collection of Alvarez's essays, Something to Declare: Essays, was published the next year. Set in the Dominican Republic, the campuses of three American universities, and in Communist Cuba during the 1960s, In the Name of Salome (2000) was called by Publisher's Weekly "one of the most moving political novels of the past half century."

Alvarez's writings have been published in periodicals ranging from the New Yorker, the New York Times, Salon, and USA Today to the Washington Post Magazine, Hispanic Culture Review and American Scholar, and she is featured in the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction.