With

Edwidge Danticat

Julia Alvarez and Edwidge Danticat Reading at Goucher College 

Best known for her novels, including How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, In the time of the Butterflies and !Yo!, Julia Alvarez is also the author of four books of poems, including Homecoming, The Other Side: El Otro Lado, and Seven Trees. Her other books include the collection of essays Something to Declare, and a children's book: The Secret Footprints.

Born in New York City, Julia Alvarez spent the first ten years of her life in the Dominican Republic, until her family fled the dictatorship there in 1960. She graduated from Middlebury College in 1971 and received a master's degree in Creative Writing from Syracuse University in 1975. From 1988 to 1998 she taught literature and creative writing at Middlebury College in Vermont, where she is now writer-in-residence. Her first publications were in poetry, but her ascent to national fame began with the appearance of her first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents. Her fiction applies a light, graceful and often witty touch to challenging subjects such as the bilingual immigrant experience in the United States and the struggles of Latin American peoples against dictatorship. In 1996 Alvarez and her husband Bill Eichner started a coffee plantation called Alta Gracia, which produces organic coffee on a fair trade basis, includes a literacy project and is dedicated to practices of sustainable agriculture; Alta Gracia lies close to the Dominican Republic's border with Haiti, the native land of Edwidge Danticat.