The acclaimed author Julia Alvarez is the longtime writer in residence at Middlebury College. Her novels include, “How The García Girls Lost Their Accents” and “In the Time of the Butterflies.” She's also a prize-winning poet, children's author and essayist.

Alvarez’s most recent novel, “The Cemetery of Untold Stories,” was published in 2024 and will be published in paperback in April 2025.

Alvarez’s family was forced to flee from the Dominican Republic to the U.S. when her father was implicated in a plot to overthrow the dictator, Rafael Trujillo. Alvarez graduated from Middlebury College in 1971 and earned her Masters in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. She returned to Middlebury College in 1988 as a full-time faculty member.

Alvarez is a founder of Border of Lights, a movement to promote peace and collaboration between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Alvarez’s work has earned her numerous awards, including a National Medal of the Arts that she received from President Obama in 2014.

I spoke with Alvarez on New Year's Eve 2014. I asked her to share her New Years Resolution.

“Something that I'm really asking myself at this stage of my life with the time left me, with whatever skills I've cultivated over a lifetime of serving an apprenticeship, how do I want to use that skill? How do I want to marshal those resources so that I feel like I'm helping the next generation that is coming after me? … What are the stories we need to be hearing to come together as a human family?" she replied.

"It's those kinds of questions I'm at least asking myself and committed to in the new year and the years to come to try to understand and to work with.”