When a young Julia Alvarez and her family moved to the United States in 1960, escaping the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, she was shocked to see scenes from the civil rights movement greet her.
“I had been hearing about this country all my life: the land of the free and the home of the brave,” Alvarez said. “But then I saw all these people being hosed down and beaten by police, and I thought, ‘Wait, is this really the land of the free?’”
Alvarez went on to become a New York Times bestselling author, and used her many experiences as an immigrant to write her breakout novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, first published in 1991. Ten years after the book’s publication, it had sold over 250,000 copies. In 2014, Alvarez was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama.
Though she was born in New York City in 1950, Alvarez lived in the Dominican Republic from the time she was one month old until she was ten years old. Her experience as an immigrant continues to inspire her work.
For the 2018 Frank B. Hanes Writers-in-Residence program at the Genome Science Center on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus on February 27, Alvarez read from the book she has been working on for four years, entitled Fluency. The book follows a man as he attempts to uncover the life story of his dying father, who is an immigrant from the Dominican Republic.
Alvarez was inspired to write the book to highlight the difficulties in communication experienced by immigrants daily.
“How do you write a book about people who can’t tell their stories?” she asked.
Along with a reading from Fluency, Alvarez read an essay she wrote, entitled “The Book I Long to Write,” about the vision she has for the book, still yet to be published.
Alvarez is currently employed at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont, as a “writer-in-residence.” The job allows Alvarez to write full-time, “teach occasionally, give readings often, visit classes [and] advise young writers,” according to her website.
Alvarez taught creative writing for several years prior to publishing How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents when she was 41 years old.
Her hobbies include yoga and gardening. She ran a shade-grown coffee farm and literacy center called Alta Garcia in the Dominican Republic with her husband, Bill Eichner.
After seeing many farmers’ small pieces of land being taken over by big businesses, Alvarez and Eichner were asked to become involved, and they developed the literacy center after noticing the lack of literacy in the area.
The couple ran the farm for 17 years, and it is currently up for sale.
“Most people in the community didn’t know how to read or write,” Alvarez said, “and stories are what connect us as a human family.”
Alvarez was also involved in the recent anthology book, It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art, published on January 16. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) organized the book’s writing and brought together over 30 acclaimed writers to protest America’s political state.
“Many of America’s leading artists and writers openly resist the current administration’s dogma and earliest policy moves, and they are not about to go gently into that good night,” the book’s publishing agency, Simon and Schuster, wrote in a summary on its website.
Alvarez was pleased to be part of the project.
“They’ve been a really important agency, especially recently, with the Dreamers and the Muslim bans,” Alvarez said. “They’re really more necessary than ever.”
As an activist, Alvarez was impressed by the protests and public outcry she has seen from young adults since the Parkland, Florida high school shooting on February 14.
“I’m amazed at how high school students have been able to generate a kind of conversation, one that has never before been this strong and this powerful,” she said.
Alvarez’s next public appearance is a poetry reading on March 22 in River Forest, Illinois.
Original cover of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez.
so cool cassidy!! proud of you