Julia Alvarez

Latina novelist Alma Huebner begs off joining her husband on a humanitarian mission to the Dominican Republic to work on her next book, and finds herself becoming obsessed with the life of her subject--a woman who hand-picked a group of orphan boys to serve as live carriers of the small pox virus in order to provide Spaniard Francisco Xavier Balmis a ready supply of vaccine with which to inoculate the populations of Spain's American colonies in 1803....

Although ten-year-old Miguel is at first embarrassed by his colorful aunt, Tia Lola, when she comes to Vermont from the Dominican Republic to stay with his mother, his sister, and him after his parents' divorce, he learns to love her.

The story of the Garcia families adjustment to life in the United States.

A story based on Dominican folklore, about the ciguapas, a tribe of beautiful underwater people whose feet are attached backwards, with their toes pointing in the direction from which they have come.

Gives a fictionalized account of four sisters in the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of General Trujillo.

On February 16, 2003, the day Laura Bush had invited poets to attend the (subsequently canceled) White House event honoring Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes, poets gathered across the country for impromptu readings to protest the coming war. In Manchester, VT, 750 people came to hear 11 poets (including Grace Paley, Donald Hall, Ruth Stone, Galway Kinnell, and Julia Alvarez). The poets' own poems are interspersed with those of others,...