BABEL

Julia Alvarez is a Dominican-American poet, novelist, and essayist. She has received grants from the NEA and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and has earned numerous awards for her work. Alvarez's first novel, published in 1991, won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for works that present a multicultural viewpoint. Released in 1994, her second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, which Just Buffalo selected as its title to accompany her BABEL engagement, has a historical premise and elaborates on the death of the Mirabal sisters during the time of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic.