Julia Alvarez

Posted in 2025-2025 Readings and Talks

Julia Alvarez left the Dominican Republic for the United States in 1960 at the age of ten. She is the author of six novels, three books of nonfiction, three collections of poetry, and eleven books for children and young adults. She has taught and mentored writers in schools and communities across America and, until her retirement in 2016, was a writer in residence at Middlebury College. Her work was included in the New York Public Library’s program “The Hand of the Poet: Original Manuscripts by 100 Masters, from John Donne to Julia Alvarez.” Her novel In the Time of the Butterflies, with over one million copies in print, was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its national Big Read program, and in 2013 President Obama awarded Alvarez the National Medal of Arts in recognition of her extraordinary storytelling. In 2024, she was the subject of an American Masters documentary, “Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined,” on PBS and in Spring 2026, she will publish Visitations, her first new collection of Alvarez’s poems in over twenty years. Alvarez is one of the founders of Border of Lights, a movement to promote peace and collaboration between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  She lives in Vermont.

Excerpt from The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez

Let’s go to Alfa Calenda

Alma once had a friend, a writer, who for years before she died, relatively young, was always talking about this one story she had to write down.

Over the course of their thirty-plus-year friendship, Alma’s friend became quite famous, winning major prizes, garnering important interviews, awards left and right. A TV movie based on one of her novels was in the works with well-known names even Alma, not a big Hollywood person, had heard of. And yet her friend dismissed these achievements as “incidentals.” The real deal was this one story that would not be hurried.

The story possessed her. She could reel off its characters, complete with their names and histories. Periodically, they compelled her to go to one or another part of the world: a gravesite in Sweden, a fishing village in Liberia, the outer islands off South Carolina where she bought a house and lived for a spell. These characters had secrets she was listening for, and the reception was better in some places than others; their voices would break through, until she’d lose the connection and it was time to move on to some other place.

Alma had stopped counting her friend’s many addresses, switching to pencil in her address book. A migrant storyteller, to be sure, Alma told her. Her writer friend liked that description, and from then on, she used it for interviews and at readings, insisting she was not a writer, or a novelist, but a migrant storyteller.

Continue reading an excerpt from The Cemetery of Untold Stories in WBUR

Links

Best of the Vermont Conversation: Author Julia Alvarez on borders and bridges in VTDigger 2 January 2025.

“The Cemetery of Untold Stories” by Julia Alvarez | Readers Club | Ep. 109 on PBS Books 25 September 2024. 

A Novelist Comes Home to Bury Her Words, and Brings Them Back to Life in The New York Times 1 April 2024

How Julia Alvarez Wrote Her Many Selves Into Existence on NPR’s Code Switch 21 August 2021.