Names/Nombres

Julia Alvarez is a Dominican American novelist, essayist, poet, and educator who is one of the most significant figures in English-language Latinx literature. Alvarez was born in New York City in 1950, but her parents moved back to the Dominican Republic when she was just three months old. When Alvarez was 10, her father was involved in a failed plot to assassinate the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and the family had to flee the country. They returned to the United States, where the young Alvarez struggled to adapt to her new life. 

In 1991, Alvarez published her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, which tells the story of a Dominican family living in the United States, trying to reconcile their Dominican culture with their new American life. She was part of a pioneering cohort of Latina writers, like Sandra Cisneros and Cristina García, who began publishing in the 1980s and ’90s, and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents was the first major novel written by a Dominican American author. Alvarez’s sophomore novel, the historical fiction In the Time of the Butterflies, published in 1994, received similar critical acclaim and is now considered a classic of Latina literature.