BOOKS

Readers ask me how come I jump around so much in terms of genres: writing poetry and children books and stories and novels and essays. I blame my life. Something happens which sends me in a new direction... and the telling requires a different form, rhythm, voice. Like writing A Cafecito Story because of my involvement in our farm in the Dominican Republic. Or writing children's books inspired by the picture books I was using with the kids and adults on the farm who were learning to read. You go where your life takes you and the song comes out of that adventure. Here are the books and a brief description of what they're about.

Oh yes, almost forgot. If you want to buy any of these books, here are links to both amazon.com and booksense.com. The Middlebury College Store also offers to send you autographed copies of any of my books as long as they are in hard cover.

Once Upon A Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the U.S.A.

This is only my second book of nonfiction, and the only book that I ever was invited to write! Well, take that back. The seed of A Cafecito Story was a request by my husband that I write "something" about the plight of coffee farmers we had become involved with in the Dominican Republic. But that wasn't an invitation so much as "this is what I want for Christmas, my birthday, and any other time you're going to get me a present for the rest of my life." How easy was that to refuse?!

Once Upon A Quinceañera began when an editor asked me to write about a book about this Latino tradition. At first, I sent regrets, but he was persistent! He asked me to think about it. I decided to attend a few of these celebrations and I got hooked on the subject.

It seemed to me that quinceañeras, those elaborate and ritualized parties thrown for young Latinas when they turn fifteen, are a perfect lens through which to view what is happening to us as a Latino community in this country. Writing the book also gave me the opportunity to review my own troubled coming of age and to understand why that passage was so difficult for me and many other young Latinas and women of my generation.

Saving the World

First off, where do I get off naming my novel, Saving the World! What can I tell you? I'm not feeling very optimistic as to where we are headed as a human family. But as the Seamus Heaney poem says, hope and history can sometimes be made to "rhyme."

This novel is about two women, one contemporary and one historical, who want desperately for this rhyme to happen. The historical story I came upon while doing research for my novel In the Name of Salomé. A footnote in a history book I was reading caught my eye: due to the occupation of the colony of Santo Domingo by the French, the 1804 Spanish smallpox expedition going around the world with the newly discovered vaccine did not make a stop there. This was the first world-wide effort to eradicate a deadly disease. Back then, travel was slow, on ships. There was no refrigeration, so the only way to keep the vaccine alive was through carriers, sequentially vaccinated. The carriers were, for the most part, orphan boys. The first group of 22 boys, between the ages of three and nine, came from an orphanage in Spain, and here's an incredible detail for a novelist to come upon: the rectoress of the orphanage went along to take care of them. Nothing is known about her except her name, Doña Isabel, her surname variously misspelled.

The second story in the novel is about Alma, a contemporary writer undergoing her own dark night of the soul. Alma has lost faith in writing, lost faith in most things. She is married to a wonderful man, whom she dearly loves, and that saves her from total despair. Her husband, who has a job at an international aid consulting firm, finds himself mixed up with an AIDS clinic (our 21st century epidemic) in a third world country where a pharmaceutical company is testing a new vaccine. These two stories, seemingly so different, begin to "speak" to each other, and I hope there is, if not a full rhyme, then a sort of half rhyme: a hope that stories can make a difference in a world that increasingly seems beyond any kind of redemption.

Algonquin put together some really terrific questions about the novel, several of which I'm not sure I can answer! Click for the Book Group Guide. I've also included a list of materials which were invaluable to me in researching this novel, including books and articles about the smallpox expedition. Click for Further Reading: Balmis Expedition.

A Gift of Gracias

The Legend of Altagracia

Often in bookstores and libraries, I've searched the shelves for a book about the Dominican "protector of the people," La Virgen de la Altagracia. I came across many books about La Virgen de Guadalupe. I also found books and entries in books about Our Lady of Fatima or Our Lady of Lourdes, and many of the myriad virgencitas worshipped throughout Latin America and Europe. But I found nothing on our own protectora. And so, I made a promesa to La Virgencita de la Altagracia, after whom I am named (Julia Altagracia) that I would write a book about her.

Finally, here it is, A Gift of Gracias: the Legend of Altagracia. I took the basic legend and wove a story which I hope you (and La Virgencita) will like. I love that her name means "high grace" or "high thanks." There is a very special grace that comes from gratitude, from saying thank you, from wanting to spread the grace of our gifts wherever we find ourselves. So thank you, readers, for giving my books life by reading them. And thank you, Beatriz Vidal, for the splendid illustrations which help make my story more than it could be all by its lonely self in black and white print!

The book was simultaneously published in English and Spanish. Un regalo de gracias: la leyenda de la Altagracia has been wonderfully translated by Liliana Valenzuela, who has also translated The Secret Footprints, Before We Were Free, and How Tía Lola Came to Visit Stay into Spanish. Her translation of finding miracles, En busca de milagros will be out this fall 2005.

finding miracles

I have met quite a few young people who were adopted from other countries by American moms and dads. I have watched them grow up and struggle to understand how to fit their "shadow" culture and world into the story of their lives. And so, I decided to write a novel about one such young woman, who was adopted from a Latin American orphanage, where her name was Milagros (Miracles). She has since become a totally American girl, Milly Kaufman, who doesn't know how to connect to her past and, therefore, avoids it. But one day a refugee from her birth country, Pablo, appears in her class. His presence becomes a challenge and a means for Milly to find Milagros and connect with her whole story.

The Woman I Kept To Myself

This is my first collection of poems in nine years! But the poems gathered here are ones I have been writing all along as I work on other books. For me, poetry is that cutting edge of the self, the part which moves out into experience ahead of every other part of the self. It's a way of saying what can't be put into words, our deepest and most secret and yet most universal feelings. I actually started writing these poems in 30 lines as a birthday poem for my fortieth birthday. A way of assessing where I had come from, where I was going. But after I had thirty poems together, and my fortieth birthday had come and gone, I kept writing. I thought, well, I'll write forty poems for my fiftieth. . .

At any rate, here are seventy-eight poems of a woman trying to understand this moment in the middle of my life by looking back with new perspectives at my younger years and looking ahead at the unknown I have to sing to understand. . . What more can I tell you? As I said, poetry is how we say what can't be put into words or into short e-summaries, either.

Before We Were Free

How do we "tell the children" about important historical events they should know about? Fiction about political subjects is a tricky thing, and when the readers are young, even more so. My young protagonist, Anita (in honor of her namesake Anne Frank), is coming of age in a dictatorship in Latin America, not unlike the one we left behind in the Dominican Republic. When her father gets taken away by the secret police, Anita and her mother go into hiding in order to avoid capture. Anita, of course, keeps a diary.

A Cafecito Story

I've talked a little about this book in my bio, a modern "eco-parable" and love story. The book grew out of a project Bill and I started in the Dominican Republic: an organic coffee farm modeling sustainable methods with a school on site to teach basic reading and writing. There's now a new Spanish/English edition, A Cafecito Story/El cuento del cafecito. One of the special moments of my writing life happened when we took this bilingual edition down to the farm, and our once illiterate neighbors were able to read passages in which their names appeared! See website at cafealtagracia.com. Also, check out some of the woodcuts by Belkis Ramirez.

How Tía Lola Came to Visit Stay

My ten-year old nephew kept asking when he was going to get to read one of my books. The pressure was on. As I sat down to write a book he could read now, I knew I wanted to address the whole issue of what it means to be Latino to children of immigrants, children born and raised in this country. I also wanted to bring my memories of my wonderful aunts, tías, to the snowy landscape of the blank page. So, when ten-year-old Miguel moves to Vermont with his mom after his parents divorce, guess who flies up from the Island to help take care of him and his little sister, Juanita? Tía Lola! A kind of Mary Poppins with a Spanish accent.

The Secret Footprints

As a little girl growing up in the Dominican Republic, I remember hearing stories of the ciguapas. (See-goo-ah-pas.) This tribe of beautiful women live underwater but come out at night to hunt for food. No one has ever been able to track them down because they have a special secret. I'd lie in bed, struggling to stay awake, hoping to spot one. I never did, until I wrote this story about one little-girl ciguapa, Guapita, who almost gives away the special secret by befriending a human boy. The illustrations by the Italian artist, Fabian Negrin, are fabulous.

In the Name of Salomé

From the moment I heard the story of Salomé Ureña, I was intrigued. Born in 1850 to a humble family, this young mulatta woman managed to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to become la musa de la patria. But her fame came with a high personal price: a tragic love story, an early death. One thing leads to another when you're writing: in the process of researching Salomé's life, I discovered that her only daughter, Camila, taught Spanish for years at Vassar College and during the summers at Middlebury College, where I am now a writer-in-residence. In 1960, Camila, then 63, gave up tenure and headed for Cuba to join a literacy brigade—an inexplicable and extraordinary choice for a woman who seemed very settled in her quiet, academic life. You wouldn't know it from reading the official stories, but Latin America has had its share of amazing women.

Seven Trees

Actually, this is not a book that you can just walk in a bookstore and buy. You've got to order it directly from Michael Russem at the press. Every aspect of its making is a labor of love. The pages are printed by a hand press on paper handmade in the Czech Republic and bound by hand. Sara Eichner, an artist and my stepdaughter, is responsible for the artwork: a series of prints focused on tree-landscapes. My contribution, seven autobiographical poems, were inspired by these prints. Check out some of Sara's work.

Something to Declare

In my bio, I mentioned that I wrote a book of autobiographical essays about my life and my writing. Some of the pieces were originally published in Allure, Essence, New York Times Magazine, Washington Post Magazine. Some began as letters to readers or as talks at conferences and schools. I write about everything in this book: from childlessness to how/why I became an American writer to researching In the Time of the Butterflies to my ten commandments of writing (not written in stone).

¡YO!

I've been asked if this novel is a sequel to How The García Girls Lost Their Accents. Not at all. The García family and their immigration to the USA were the focus of the first novel. In this novel, the character of Yolanda serves as a sort of catalyst to bring forth stories from friends, family members, strangers who have a score to settle with her. In the course of telling their stories, these characters often reveal more about their own yos ("I" in Spanish) than about Yo.

Director Julia Solomonoff's sassy & funny movie based on the chapter titled, "The Suitor," will be airing on PBS in September 2005 (check the schedule in your area). Visit GiganticPictures.com for more on the film.

Homecoming: New and Collected Poems

My first love has always been poetry. This collection is actually a reissuing of Homecoming, published in 1984 by Grove Press, now out of print. All the old poems from the first edition are here as well as newer work. I wrote an afterword for this second edition, recalling how I freaked when this, my first book, was published. I wanted to go out and buy all copies of the book before anyone could read it. I laugh now, but it reminds me how terrified we women were in the not so long ago past to have public voices.

The Other Side/El Otro Lado

Although this book includes some shorter lyrics, most of it is made up of two longer, narrative poems: "Joe," which follows a failed love affair; and the title poem, "The Other Side," a kind of female Odyssey in which a woman with a trail of failures in the U.S.A. returns to her childhood homeland and ends up living in a small fishing village on the other side of all she knows.

In The Time of the Butterflies

In 1960, a few months after my family fled the dictatorship of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, the three Mirabal sisters were brutally murdered. Founders of the underground, las Mariposas (the Butterflies, their code name) had inspired resistance cells throughout the country. (My father had joined one of these cells, which was cracked by the Secret Police in the summer of 1960—the reason we were forced to flee.) This novel tells the Mirabal story through the lens of fiction. Needless to say, this book is one I felt compelled to write. The day of the murder of the Mirabal sisters, November 25th, has been declared by the United Nations, International Day Against Violence Against Women. I'd love it if we began a tradition of wearing a butterfly on that day!

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

The four García sisters come to this country as young girls with their immigrant parents. Suddenly, they are swept up in the freewheeling American culture of the 60s (then, the 70s and 80s) with its dizzying choices and challenges. Somehow, they have to try to straddle this life with their Island/Latino culture as represented by Mami and Papi. What is lost, what is gained when a family leaves an old world to come to a new?

I've written or edited other books -- but since they are either out of print or not written solely by me and since this section's already long enough, I'll list them in that complete resumé for any of you who might want to know about them.