Novelist, essayist and poet Julia
Alvarez will give the main address at the Founders Day convocation on Thursday,
Feb. 26, at 11:30 a.m. in Memorial
Chapel.
Alvarez, whose address is titled
“In Celebration of Founders Day,” will receive an honorary doctor of letters
degree from the College.
Alvarez's writing incorporates her
vivid memories of childhood in the Dominican
Republic, which her family fled in 1960, and
the subsequent adjustment to a new life in New York City.
She first made her mark as a poet
but is best known for her novels. Her first novel, How the García Girls Lost
Their Accents, received the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, was listed
by Americas
magazine as 1993's No. 1 bestseller in Latin America,
and was named by both the ALA and
The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of 1991. Her second
novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, was nominated for the 1995
National Book Critics Circle Award.
She received her bachelor's
degree, summa cum laude, from Middlebury
College; and her MFA from Syracuse
University. She was a fellow at the
Bread Loaf School of English.
From 1975 until 1978, she served
as poet-in-the-schools in Kentucky,
Delaware, and North
Carolina. She has held positions as a professor of
creative writing and English at Phillips
Andover Academy
in Massachusetts, University
of Vermont, and the University
of Illinois. In 1984, she was the
Jenny McKean Moore Visiting Writer at George
Washington University.
Since 1988, she has been a professor of English at Middlebury
College.