Author Archives: Karelyn Torres

My Research on Julia Alvarez

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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

 

Poetry in Motion – Notes on Longing by Tina Chang

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Notes on Longing by Tina Chang

The title of the poem that I found on the six train line is “Notes on Longing” by Tina Chang. My initial reaction to this specific poem was that is was a bit hard for me to understand what it was talking about. The visual arts that accompany this poem is a towel, a sock and what appears to be a bed sheet drying outside by the sun. You could see the sun that is being represented by the sun and it’s being reflected off a blue and white background. There is a few others colors such as green and white on the sock, blue, white and gray on the bed sheet and a white towel with three white lines. I believe that this poem was chosen for the subway riders because people can relate to it, riders have families to go home to. The speaker to this poem is unknown and the subject is coming home. In my understanding the themes that this poem explores is home and family. This poem is accessible for general readers because they are riders that are on their home and its not a hard poem after you’ve read it more than once. A question that I do have about this poem is what does the first two lines in the beginning mean, what do they have to do with the rest of the poem?