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Like fellow Festival author Javier Zamora, Alvarez was a young child when her family came to the United States to escape a violent and oppressive regime. After her father was implicated in a plot to overthrow the Dominican Republic’s brutal dictator, Rafael Trujillo, ten-year-old Alvarez fled with her parents to New York City. The stunning body of work that resulted from her life experience places her in the ranks of groundbreaking writers such as Amy Tan, Jhumpa Lahiri, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Sandra Cisneros, whose tales of diaspora have become much-loved touchstones that demonstrate how immigrants enrich our world in countless ways. Alvarez’s first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, tells the semi-autobiographical story of four Dominican sisters growing up in the U.S. and trying to assimilate while also retaining their cultural heritage. The book quickly became a modern-day classic, as did its follow-up, In the Time of the Butterflies. These novels, along with Alvarez’s other beloved stories, including those for children and young adults, detail not only the complexities of being an immigrant but of being a girl or woman in particular. Her books take us on a journey through the stages of female life and, as such, are like wise and thoughtful friends. When she met the Obamas, Alvarez gave Malia and Sasha copies of In the Time of the Butterflies and the novel Before We Were Free. We’re sure the
girls were suitably gobsmacked. “Everyone needs a strong sense of self,” Alvarez has said. “It is our base of operations for everything we do in life.”
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