JULIA ALVAREZ

A brief account of my writing life

     I came into English as a ten-year old from the Dominican Republic, and I consider this radical uprooting from my culture, my native language, my country, the reason I began writing. "Language is the only homeland," Czeslow Milosz once observed, and indeed, English, not the United States, was where I landed and sunk deep roots. I began writing seriously in college, encouraged by generous teachers. I won the Benjamin T. Marshall Prize in poetry two years in a row at Connecticut College (1968, 1969), and then the Creative Writing Prize at Middlebury College (1971). These acknowledgements gave me confidence to go on to Syracuse University, where I earned an MA in Creative Writing (1975) and won the American Academy of Poetry Prize (1974). After Syracuse, I was hired by the Kentucky Arts Commission to be one of three poets in the state's poetry-in-the-schools programs (1975-77). I traveled extensively throughout the state, conducting workshops in schools, prisons, old age homes. From Kentucky, I went on to do pilot projects with the National Endowment for the Arts in a bilingual program in Delaware (1978) and a senior-citizen program in North Carolina (1978), and of course, I kept on writing poems, publishing them in small magazines, giving readings. In 1979, I was the The John Atherton Scholar in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. This association with Bread Loaf has continued--for I was a Fellow there in both poetry (1986) and fiction (1987), and am now a member of the rotating staff. In 1984, my book of poems, Homecoming, was published by Grove Press. With a Kenan Grant from Phillips Andover Academy (1980), I took a summer off to try my hand at writing fiction, for my own Island background was steeped in a tradition of storytelling that I wanted to explore in prose. Over the years, I won several prizes for my stories, including a Third Woman Press Award (1986), a General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers, (1986), a Research Board Award from the University of Illinois (1986), a PEN Syndicated Fiction Prize (1987), and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Grant (1990). I never abandoned poetry, of course, and it was a manuscript of poems which won me a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1987). My first book of fiction, a collection of linked stories, was published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in May, 1991, How The García Girls Lost Their Accents. My second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, was published in 1994, again by Algonquin Books. Homecoming: New and Collected Poems, my first book of poems, was reissued by Dutton in April 1996. The collection includes many new poems. My second book of poems, The Other Side: El Otro Lado, was also published by Dutton in 1995. A new novel, ¡YO! will be published January 1997 by Algonquin. During all these years of writing, I have had an active career as a teacher of English and Creative Writing: at Phillips Andover Academy (1979-81), at the University of Vermont (1981-1983), at George Washington University (as the Jenny McKean Moore Fellow, 1984-1985), at the University of Illinois (1985-1988). Since 1988 I have been teaching literature and creative writing at Middlebury College where I am a tenured member of the English Department.

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A comprehensive listing of publications by Julia Alvarez

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Further biographic information on Julia Alvarez

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