Julia Alvarez was raised in Dominican Republic and born in New York on March 27, 1950. Her father was involved with a plot to overthrow the dictator of Dominican Republic, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina when she was ten years old. Her father was able to get the family out of the country with the help of an American Agent. In an interview with the Chicago Public Library, she states that moving to the United States made her a writer because the Dominican society that she grew up in did not encourage women to have careers. So when she go to the United States she thought she knew the language but turns out she spoke it with a heavy accent and the young American kids were not forgiving about it. This led to the company of books and since she didn’t know the language too well she had to pay close attention to the words which made good practice. One of her most popular works is actually a novel called “In the Time of the Butterflies”, this novel was made into a movie. Yes Alvarez has many other type of works for example, like children books and stories, novels, and essays. A few examples are “How Tia Lola Saved the Summer”, “Return to Sender” and “A Wedding in Haiti.” Something that stood out to me was that in her website it says “La Napa” which means a little extra or what is left over and in that section of the website she writes little essays about topics she deems important in society.
The websites that I used for this blog post are
- https://www.notablebiographies.com/A-An/Alvarez-Julia.html
- https://www.juliaalvarez.com
- https://www.chipublib.org/interview-with-julia-alvarez/
