40 Fun Facts About Julia Alvarez

Julia Alvarez, raised in the Dominican Republic until age ten, was actually born in which US city?

New York City was her birthplace in 1950, but her parents took her back to the Dominican Republic when she was three months old. She only returned to live in America at ten.

Which US president awarded Julia Alvarez the National Medal of Arts for storytelling about identity and family?

Barack Obama presented the medal, whose citation praised how her poetry and prose reveal the human capacity for strength in the face of oppression.

The sisters in Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies were murdered in 1960 for opposing which dictator?

Rafael Trujillo held power in the Dominican Republic for three decades, and one historian wrote that the sisters' murders affected Dominicans more than most of his other crimes.

After How the García Girls Lost Their Accents came out, which relative refused to speak to Julia Alvarez for months?

Her mother went silent because the novel drew so closely on the family's own story of exile. Alvarez's sisters were not pleased with the book either.

What is unusual about the timeline of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Julia Alvarez's three-part debut novel?

It runs in reverse, opening with the four sisters as adults in 1989 and ending with their island childhood in 1956.

Julia Alvarez and her husband founded Alta Gracia, a Dominican mountain farm and literacy center, to grow which crop?

Coffee was the crop: grown organically in the shade, its sales supported a school on the farm where children and adults learned to read.

Which organization made the Mirabal sisters' death date, November 25, its day for ending violence against women?

The United Nations chose the date in 1999 to honor the three sisters, whose story reached English readers through Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies.

Julia Alvarez's Tía Lola books bring a Dominican aunt to which New England state, the author's own longtime home?

Vermont is where young Miguel moves after his parents split, and where his possibly magical aunt arrives from the island to help.

Which actress played the outspoken Minerva in the 2001 Showtime film of Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies?

Salma Hayek played Minerva Mirabal, the sister whose underground code name, Butterfly, gave the story its title.

Julia Alvarez helped found Border of Lights, a movement for peace between the Dominican Republic and which country?

Haiti is the Dominican Republic's only land neighbor, and the movement Alvarez helped start promotes collaboration as well as peace across that border.

Julia Alvarez's How the García Girls Lost Their Accents is known for mixed-up idioms in which blended way of speaking?

Spanglish colors the speech of Laura García, who scrambles English sayings as she adapts to her new country.

Julia Alvarez's novel Saving the World retells a real 1803 Spanish expedition carrying a vaccine against which disease?

Smallpox vaccine crossed the oceans carried by orphan boys, and Alvarez tells the voyage from the viewpoint of its only woman, the head of an orphanage.

The Dominican dictator whose regime Julia Alvarez's family fled in 1960 lost power the following year in what way?

He was assassinated by a group of conspirators on 30 May 1961, six months after the Mirabal sisters were killed.

Julia Alvarez's family fled the Dominican Republic for America when she was ten because of her father's role in what?

A failed coup plot against the dictator made her father a target, and the family left in 1960, three months before the Mirabal sisters were murdered.

Which singer played Lío, Minerva's first love, in the 2001 film of Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies?

Marc Anthony took the small role of the young rebel whose nickname for Minerva, Butterfly, becomes her name in the resistance.

Which of the four sisters in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents is a poet and Julia Alvarez's alter ego?

Yolanda, a poet and schoolteacher, has the voice heard most often in the novel, and Alvarez later gave her a sequel of her own.

Which sister in In the Time of the Butterflies stays out of the underground and lives to tell the story?

Dedé raised her murdered sisters' children, opened a museum in their memory and lived until 2014, when she died at 88.

Julia Alvarez graduated summa cum laude from which college, where she later became writer-in-residence?

Middlebury gave her a bachelor's degree in 1971 after she transferred in, and she was teaching there when her first novel came out at age 41.

Julia Alvarez twice won which children's book honor, for Before We Were Free and for Return to Sender?

Pura Belpré Award winners are Latino authors and illustrators, and the prize is named for a storyteller who preserved Puerto Rican folklore for children.

In Julia Alvarez's Return to Sender, Tyler's family hires undocumented Mexican workers to save a farm producing what?

Milk is the family business: Tyler's father is a dairy farmer, and Tyler befriends Mari, the daughter of one of the hired workers, despite their different legal status.

Julia Alvarez's first picture book retells the Dominican legend of the ciguapas, creatures known for which feature?

Backward feet leave tracks pointing the wrong way, which keeps the ciguapas hidden from humans and gave The Secret Footprints its title.

In In the Time of the Butterflies, Minerva Mirabal trains for which profession but is denied a license to practice?

Lawyer was the career Minerva trained for, and the real Minerva Mirabal graduated summa cum laude before her license to practice was turned down.

In Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies, the youngest sister, María Teresa, tells her chapters in which form?

Diary entries follow María Teresa into the underground, which she discovers after questioning Minerva about a crate of guns delivered to the house.

In In the Time of the Butterflies, eldest sister Patria considers becoming what before marrying at sixteen?

A nun was Patria's first calling, and her faith later pulls her into the resistance after she witnesses a battle while on a religious retreat.

In In the Time of the Butterflies, as in history, who was killed alongside the three Mirabal sisters on a mountain road?

Their driver, Rufino de la Cruz, had taken them over the mountains to visit their jailed husbands and was killed with them on the way home.

Dominicans privately mocked the dictator Julia Alvarez's family fled as Chapitas, a nickname meaning what?

Bottlecaps poked fun at the rows of medals he loved to wear, a joke Dominicans kept private while statues of him went up across the country.

In the Name of Salomé by Julia Alvarez follows Camila Henríquez Ureña, who became a citizen of which country?

Cuba drew Camila back in 1959 because she believed in the revolution's ideals, and she taught at the University of Havana until she retired.

In How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Carlos García, the youngest of 35 children, follows which profession?

Physician Carlos García works in medicine again after the family's escape, and he makes a point of educating the accents out of his daughters.

Julia Alvarez earned her master's degree in creative writing at which university, four years after finishing college?

Syracuse awarded her the degree in 1975, during a restless stretch in which she had more than 15 addresses in the first 13 years of her adult life.

Julia Alvarez wrote The Cemetery of Untold Stories, about a novelist burying unfinished manuscripts, after losing what?

Sight in one eye was gone, and fearing her unfinished characters would never be told, she slowly learned new ways of working to give them a home.

Which 2020 book was Julia Alvarez's first adult novel in 14 years, turning from coming-of-age tales to growing old?

Afterlife appeared when Alvarez was 70, and it weaves Spanish words into the story without italics, quotation marks or translations.

Which PBS documentary series profiled Julia Alvarez in the 2024 film A Life Reimagined?

American Masters has aired biographies of the country's most enduring writers, musicians and artists since 1986, putting Alvarez in that company.

A school district in Port Washington banned Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies over a diagram of what?

A homemade bomb is sketched in the novel, and two local high school students argued against the ban in a newspaper opinion piece.

Which actor played the Dominican dictator in the 2001 Showtime film of Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies?

Edward James Olmos played the strongman, who first notices the young Minerva at a school play and later dances with her at his palace.

Bullied at school after arriving in America at ten, Julia Alvarez says she found refuge in a good teacher and where?

The public library put books in her hands, and she has said that reading showed her worlds where everybody was welcome.

In How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, what discovery gets Sofía sent to the island for a year?

A bag of marijuana gets Sofía pulled out of boarding school, a punishment the novel treats as a turning point in the girls' drift from island ways.

Julia Alvarez's autobiographical 1998 book Something to Declare is a collection of which kind of writing?

Essays fill the book, in which Alvarez looks back on her childhood, her family's exile and how she became a writer.

Whose 2000 novel The Feast of the Goat portrays the same Dominican dictatorship as Julia Alvarez's fiction?

Mario Vargas Llosa first published it in Spain as La fiesta del chivo, and it refers often to the Mirabal sisters, the heroines of Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies.

Julia Alvarez's papers are held at the Harry Ransom Center, a literary archive in which Texas city?

Austin is home to the University of Texas archive, whose holdings include a Gutenberg Bible and the papers of Gabriel García Márquez.

At thirteen, Julia Alvarez was sent to Abbot Academy, a girls' boarding school in which state?

Massachusetts was home to Abbot Academy, one of New England's first incorporated secondary schools for young women, which merged with Phillips Academy in 1973.