In conversation with Rebeca L. Hey-Colón, Professor of Latinx Studies, Temple University

Awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama in 2013, poet, essayist, and fiction writer Julia Alvarez is renowned for her lyrical, poignant, politically insightful books. These many works include How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, which details the lives of four sisters before and after their exile from the Dominican Republic; In the Time of the Butterflies, a million-copy bestseller that was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its national Big Read program; and Afterlife, a novel that explores the notion of keeping faith with our fellow humans in a broken world. Alvarez's many awards include the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature, a Latina Leader Award in Literature from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, and the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature. In The Cemetery of Untold Stories, Alvarez explores the very nature of storytelling in the tale of a fiction writer who finds that her buried untold stories have taken on lives of their own.

(recorded 4/4/2024)