Biography and photograph provided by Random House, Inc.

Shortly after her birth in New York City on March 27, 1950, Julia Alvarez moved with her family to the Dominican Republic, where she spent her first ten years. In 1960, amid the fallout of a failed coup involving Alvarez's father against the Trujillo dictatorship, the family was forced to flee to the United States. As a high school student in New York, Alvarez set her sights on a writing career: "What made me into a writer was coming to this country," Alvarez has said. "All of a sudden losing a culture, a homeland, a language, a family.... I wanted a portable homeland - and that's the imagination."

After graduating with summa cum laude honors from Middlebury College, Alvarez earned her M.A. degree in creative writing from Syracuse University in 1975. Alvarez began her post-graduate career serving as Poet-in-the-Schools in Kentucky, Delaware, and North Carolina. Currently a professor of English at Middlebury College, she has previously taught at several institutions, including George Washington University, University of Illinois, and University of Vermont. She and her husband also run an organic coffee farm and a literacy project in the Dominican Republic.

The condition of exile Alvarez has known so intimately was the touchstone for her breakout novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and its sequel ¡Yo! (1997). Alvarez's most celebrated work to date, In the Time of the Butterflies, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1994. In 1998, Alvarez published Something to Declare, a collection of essays. Alvarez's acclaimed volumes of poetry include The Housekeeping Book (1994), The Other Side/El Otro Lado (1995), and Homecoming: New and Selected Poems (1996). In 1997, Alvarez's verse was featured in the New York Public Library's exhibition "Original Manuscripts by 100 Masters, from John Donne to Julia Alvarez."

Her books have been translated into nine languages and have won numerous prizes, including the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and the American Library Association's Notable Book of the Year honor. She is also the recipient of an honorary doctorate in humane letters from the City University of New York and an Alumni Achievement Award from Middlebury College. In 1997, the Dominican Republic dedicated its Annual Book Fair to the artistic and humanitarian contributions of Julia Alvarez.