1. She was born March 27, 1950 in New York.
2. Her parents are native Dominicans and she spent the first ten years of her childhood in the Dominican Republic.
3. Her father's involvement in a political rebellion to overthrow the dictator forced her family to flee the country and they ended up back in New York; her book How the García Girls Lost Their Accents is based on this incident.
4. At the age of 13 she was sent to boarding school because her New York neighborhood was viewed as unsafe by her parents.
5. She attended Connecticut College, Middlebury College and Syracuse.
6. She was once a writer-in-residence for the Kentucky Arts Commission and now holds the position of writer-in-residence at Middlebury College.
7. She has written 5 novels, a book of essays, 4 poetry collections, 4 children's books, and 2 works of adolescent fiction.
8. Her second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, is based on the deaths of the Mirabal sisters and was made into a movie featuring Salma Hayek.
9. Her third novel, ¡Yo!, is a sequel to How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.
10. Her latest novel, Return to Sender, was the winner of the American Library Association's Pura Belpré Author Award for 2010.
Have you read anything by Julia Alvarez?
I haven't yet, but I like books about the immigrant experience. I've got to read one of hers.
