Julia Alvarez

"Names/Nombres" is a actually less a story, and more a personal essay. Rather than creating a fictional plot and characters, Julia Alvarez is reflecting on her own experiences and combining them to...

Julia Alvarez is a Dominican-American writer. She was born on March 27, 1950. Now, she writes about how she learned English. She emphasizes her struggles with English. Julia was born in New York...

This poem concerns a young girl’s early attempts at self-definition. Her perpetual scribbling is, in essence, an insistent yearning to remember her inner self and to remain true to her dreams. She...

The father of Alvarez's "Daughter of Invention" has realized that his behavior the night before was over-reactive and rather cruel. For, as he listened to the daughter read her speech, written...

Julia Alvarez opens the essay “Names/Nombres” with a catalogue of mispronunciations, starting with her family’s arrival at Immigration in New York, where the officer addressed her father as “Mister...

This story, which is told from the first-person point of view, focuses on the narrator's immigrant family from the Dominican Republic. The story reveals interrelated conflicts that arise out of the...

In the very first paragraph of “My English,” Julia tells us that she and her family, living in the Dominican Republic, only spoke Spanish at home. However, all that changed when Julia and her...

"I, Too, Sing América" by Julia Alvarez is a response to both Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" and Langston Hughes's "I, Too, Sing America," and it shares their theme of diversity. Whitman's...

Of course, all symbols represent something bigger and larger than just themselves, and this short story is no exception. Clearly, for me, the biggest symbol in this short story is the typewriter...

Julia Alvarez lives with her partner Bill Eichner, and together founded the Alta Gracia Foundation to support local libraries. She is influenced mainly by stories her father told her as a child...

"Daughter of Invention" focuses on the relationship between a daughter and her mother. The first mentions of the child's father are in passing: the girls, with our narrator as their spokesperson,...

In answering a question about tone, make sure to think about how the author feels about his subject. We can accomplish this task by looking at the word choice, particularly imagery, and then...

Novelist, poet, and essayist Julia Alvarez writes complex examinations of the multicultural Latin American experience by employing her Dominican heritage and melding it with her American...

Yes, there is figurative language in Julia Alvarez's poem "Woman's Work." There is a range of this language. There are visual images (like her scrubbing the floor). There are analogies ("keep house...

Julia Alvarez's "Daughter of Invention" is a short story about the cultural adjustments of a family who flee the revolutionary Dominican Republican and immigrate to New York. In the family's...

The questions indicate it may be helpful to 1) chose a style of literary criticism relative to a specific piece of writing by the author and 2) separate the author from her work. One style of...

In this story of a family suffering persecution and under surveillance because of their lack of support for the president of their country, Mr. Victor, the American consul, is a close friend of the...

Below is an idea of an outline that would contain Julia Alvarez' biographical information, as well as information of some of her literary writings....

In In The Time of The Butterflies, the butterflies (las mariposas) are Dede's sisters who were tragically murdered (and therefore martyred) because of their involvement in the Dominican Republic's...

You will find the idiom “To me it makes no difference. To me.” in Julia Alvarez’s book Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA. An idiom is a type of figurative language in which the...

This is obviously a question that could have a lot of varied answers, but I think that Julia Alvarez has done a great job of proving that she is a novelist of literary merit. She has a unique and...

Minerva becomes a leader of the underground movement against Trujillo and is code named Mariposa, which means butterfly. She eventually arrested for her insurgent activities and is imprisoned as is...