VISITATIONS with JULIA ALVAREZ

1:30 pm - 2:30 pm
| Location of Session: Russell Hill Rogers Tent
Adult Sessions

Start of Signing: 2:45 PM
| Signing Location: Adult Signing Tent

My Schedule

About the Event

The beloved Julia Alvarez (Visitations) returns to her first love, poetry, in her latest collection, with scintillating poems drawn from all the seasons of her life, from childhood to the years of silver. Alvarez traces her life through memories of her childhood in the Dominican Republic, a dictatorship dramatically survived, the smell of sancocho and sofrito, tías and the sisters who forged her, her move to America and the challenges of learning English, and the search for mental health, beauty, redemption, and success. We meet her grandchild, her mother, and her lovers and encounter the homes where she grew up and into the formidable writer read in thousands of classrooms across America today. “Each of the poems included here are visitations from writing selves of the past and present that still have something to say to me and, I hope, to my readers,” Alvarez tells us. Come and listen as two literary madrinas engage in a rare, much-anticipated conversation.

Introduced by:

John Olivares Espinoza

About the Author

Photo Credit: Corey Hendrickson

Julia Alvarez

Julia Alvarez left the Dominican Republic for the United States in 1960 at the age of ten. She is the author of six novels, three books of nonfiction, four collections of poetry, and eleven books for children and young adults. She has taught and mentored writers in schools and communities across America and, until her retirement in 2016, was a writer in residence at Middlebury College. Her work was included in the New York Public Library’s program The Hand of the Poet: Original Manuscripts by 100 Masters, from John Donne to Julia Alvarez. Her novel In the Time of the Butterflies, with over one million copies in print, was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its national Big Read program, and in 2013 President Barack Obama awarded Alvarez the National Medal of Arts, in recognition of her extraordinary storytelling. In 2024, she was the subject of an American Masters documentary, “Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined,” on PBS. Alvarez is one of the founders of Border of Lights, a movement to promote peace and collaboration between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. She lives in Vermont.

Julia joins the Book Festival to share her new collection, Visitations: Poems.

Moderator

Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short-story writer, novelist, and essayist whose work explores the lives of the working class. Her numerous awards include National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in both poetry and fiction, the Texas Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur Fellowship, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, the National Medal of Arts, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation, and the Harold Washington Literary Award.

Her novel The House on Mango Street has sold over seven million copies, has been translated into over 25 languages, and is required reading in elementary schools, high schools, and universities across the nation. In 2024, The House on Mango Street was published in the Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics Series in recognition of the 40th anniversary of its original publication.

A new collection of poetry, Woman Without Shame, Cisneros’s first in 28 years, was published in 2022 by Knopf and also by Vintage Español in a Spanish language translation by Liliana Valenzuela, Mujer sin vergüenza. Cisneros is at work on a new novel, Infinito, to be published by Knopf in 2027. Cisneros is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico. As a single woman, she chose to have books instead of children. She earns her living by her pen.

Photo Courtesy of Keith Dannemiller