Recorded April 7, 2020
Named “Woman of the Year” by Latina magazine in 2000, poet, essayist, and fiction writer Julia Alvarez is renowned for her lyrical, poignant, politically insightful books, including 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; and Return to Sender, a novel about the families of undocumented Mexican workers in Vermont. Her many awards include the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature and the 2013 National Medal of Arts. Afterlife, her first adult novel in 15 years, considers our political moment and asks: What do we owe those in crisis in our families, including members of our human family? How do we live in a broken world without losing faith in one another or ourselves? And how do we stay true to those glorious souls we have lost?
