Julia Álvarez

Julia Alvarez (born March 27, 1950) is a poet, novelist, and essayist. Born in New York, her parents returned to their native Dominican Republic when she was three months of age and raised her there until she was ten. In 1960, the family fled back to the United States, after her father participated in the underground against the military dictator, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. Three months later the leaders of the underground railroad, the Mirabal sisters, were murdered. She based her second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, on those murders. It was subsequently made into a film produced by Salma Hayek. She is currently writer-in-residence at Middlebury College and the owner of a coffee farm named Alta Gracia, near Jarabacoa in the mountains of the Dominican Republic. The farm hosts a DREAM school to teach local farmers and their families how to read and write. Alvarez graduated from Abbot Academy in 1967. She attended Middlebury College in 1971, after transferring from...