Julia Alvarez

Curiosity - A passionate motivation to explore the unknown and learn new things.

Julia Alvarez’s birthday is on March 27th.

Julia Alvarez has bridged the Americas many times. She was born in New York and raised in the Dominican Republic until the age of ten, when her family immigrated to the United States to escape the dictator Trujillo. She is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist, and currently a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College in Vermont.

Alvarez notes, “As a kid, I loved stories, hearing them, telling them. Since ours was an oral culture, stories were not written down. It took coming to this country for reading and writing to become allied in my mind with storytelling.”

Alvarez is regarded as one of the most critically and commercially successful Latina writers of her time. She is the author of many books for children and adults published in both English and Spanish language. In 2002, Alvarez received the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature.

She is happily settled down with her compañero, Bill Eichner, on eleven acres in Vermont.