PEN Out Loud: Julia Alvarez and Elizabeth Acevedo

See photos from the event.

We celebrate the 25th anniversary of Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies, a haunting fictional account of three sisters involved with a resistance movement against an oppressive government that fatally silenced them, and a story that continues to resonate today. Alvarez will be joined in conversation by National Book Award winner Elizabeth Acevedo (The Poet X). Together, Alvarez and Acevedo stand as leading Latinx voices in the American literary canon, and will join us for an intergenerational conversation on craft, legacy, and literature.

Presented in collaboration with The Graduate Center, CUNY. 

Julia Alvarez has written novels (How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, ¡Yo!, In the Name of Salomé, Saving the World), collections of poems (Homecoming, The Other Side/ El Otro Lado, The Woman I Kept to Myself), nonfiction (Something to Declare, Once Upon A Quinceañera, A Wedding in Haiti), and numerous books for young readers (including the Tía Lola Stories series, Before We Were Free, finding miracles, Return to Sender, and Where Do They Go?). A recipient of a 2013 National Medal of Arts, 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. Author photo © Bill Eichner

Elizabeth Acevedo is the New York Times best selling author of the award-winning novel, The Poet X and the chapbook Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths (YesYes Books, 2016). She holds a BA in Performing Arts from The George Washington University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. Acevedo is a winner of the National Book Award, Boston-Globe Hornbook Award Prize, and a National Poetry Slam Champion. She resides in Washington, DC with her husband.