2026 Lannan Literary Festival: An Evening with Julia Alvarez

On March 24, 2026, Dominican-American poet, novelist and essayist, Julia Alvarez read from her latest poetry collection in conversation with radio host Georgina Godwin. The poems in Visitations reflect on change across the arc of decades—family, aging, love, the body, finding voice, and the very act of poetry itself.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, three 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 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 and in Spring 2026, she will publish Visitations, her first new collection of Alvarez’s poems in over twenty years. 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.