Membership: Academy of American Poets the Associated Writing Programs Poets & Writers the Latin American Writers' Institute.Īwards: Benjamin T. of VT, English Dept., visiting assistant prof., 1981 –83 George Washington Univ., Jenny McKean Moore Visiting Writer, 1984 –85 Univ.
of the Sequoias, Visalia, CA, English instructor, 1977 DE Arts Council, writer-in-residence, 1978 NEA, writer-in-residence, Fayetteville, NC, 1978 Phillips Andover Academy, Andover, MA, English instr., 1979 –81 Univ. Education: Connecticut College, 1968 –69 Middlebury College, B.A., 1971 Syracuse University, M.A., 1975.Ĭareer: KY Arts Commission, writer-in-residence, 1975 –77 California State Coll. I found in books a place to go." At a Glance. You didn't have to suffer what was going on around you.
#DUSTING BY JULIA ALVAREZ PORTABLE#
She explained to Frontera Magazine, "Coming to this country I discovered books, I discovered that it was a way to enter into a portable homeland that you could carry around in your head. "Back home, I had been a very poor student, a tomboy, and a troublemaker, so my father was eager to encourage this new trend in ," she told Library Journal. Her father took her to a library, and Alvarez discovered her love for the written word. Uprooted from her culture, her native language, and extended family, Alvarez, once a vivacious child who made friends easily, became introverted. Once the plane landed in New York, Alvarez's story-book image of life in the United States was quickly shattered by the harsh realities of life as an immigrant. And here I was, an American girl, coming home at last." … All my childhood I had longed for this moment of arrival.
#DUSTING BY JULIA ALVAREZ FULL#
At night, my prayers were full of blond hair and blue eyes and snow. "I had gone to an American school and spent most of the day speaking and reading English. "All my childhood I had dressed like an American, eaten American foods, and befriended American children," Alvarez told American Scholar. For Alvarez, the mystique of the United States loomed large in her ten-year-old mind. Their destination was New York, where Alvarez's father had secured a fellowship at a hospital.
To avoid this fate the family fled the country. As a result, the police set up surveillance on their home and Alvarez's father was warned by an American agent that his arrest was imminent. When Alvarez was ten years old, her father became actively involved in the underground coalition poised to overthrow dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. The second of four sisters, she was reared close to her mother's family, amidst a slew of cousins, aunts, uncles, and maids. From Latina to "Gringa"Īlthough Alvarez was born in New York City on March 27, 1950, soon after her birth her parents returned to their native home of the Dominican Republic, where her father, a doctor, ran a local hospital. Her writings include four novels, two collections of poetry, a book of essays, and two children's stories. Alvarez became a nationally acclaimed author in 1991 at the age of 41 with the publication of her first novel, How the Garc ía Girls Lost Their Accent. She discovered through words she could build her own worlds that both revealed and transcended the meaning of her life. Thrown into a foreign language and culture as a child, Alvarez found refuge in books and writing. Dominican author Julia Alvarez has given voice to the themes of displacement, alienation, and search for identity in her poetry and fiction.
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