Her work includes two more novels, In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) and Yo! (1997), and several collections of poetry: The Housekeeping Book, Homecoming, and The Other Side/El Otro Lado.

She has also taught at the University of Vermont at Burlington, George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and the University of Illinois. A lot of what I have worked through has got to do with coming to this country and losing a homeland and a culture, as a way of making sense.'Īlvarez graduated summa cum laude from Middlebury College in Vermont, where she presently teaches, and earned a Masters degree from Syracuse University. In an interview with Catherine Wiley in Bloomsbury Review, Alvarez explains, 'I think when I write, I write out of who I am and the questions I need to figure out. Like Yolanda, the main character in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Alvarez turned to books and writing as an escape from her frustrating acculturation experiences. The family returned to the Bronx, in New York City, where her father started a successful medical practice. While there, her father, like the novel's patriarch, was forced to flee with his family after he led a failed attempt to oust Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Alvarez was born in New York City on March 27, 1950, but soon relocated to the Dominican Republic, where she lived until she was ten. Julia Alvarez admits that her critically acclaimed novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents is a semi-autobiographical account of her family as they struggled to adjust to American culture. She shows how the tensions of successes and failures don't have to tear families apart.' Author Biography Donna Rifkind, in the New York Times Book Review, writes that Alvarez has 'beautifully captured the threshold experiences of the new immigrant, where the past is not yet a memory and the future remains an anxious dream.' Jason Zappe similarly notes in The American Review that 'Alvarez speaks for many families and brings to light the challenges faced by many immigrants. The years in between are filled with the difficult process of acculturation for all members of the family.

The stories begin in 1989 with Yolanda's visit to her native country, the Dominican Republic, and work backward to 1956, before the family immigrated to New York City. The novel's collection of fifteen short stories relates, in reverse chronological order, the experiences of the de la Torre-García family: patriarch Carlos (Papi), mother Laura (Mami), and their four daughters-Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia. Most reviewers praise the novel's exploration of a Dominican-American family's struggle with assimilation and the resulting clash between Hispanic and American cultures.

Julia Alvarez's first novel, the semi-autobiographical How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, gained generally favorable reviews and brought her work to the attention of a wide group of critics and readers. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents Julia Alvarez

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