Open to all Attendees Poet, novelist and essayist Julia Alvarez was born in New York of Dominican descent. She spent the first ten years of her childhood in the Dominican Republic, until her father's involvement in a political rebellion forced her family to flee the country. Alvarez rose to prominence with the novels How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of Butterflies and iYo!. Her publications as a poet include The Housekeeping Book and The Woman I Kept to Myself, and as an essayist the autobiographical compilation Something to Declare. In addition to her successful writing career, Julia Alvarez is the current writer-in-residence at Middlebury College in Vermont.
