Women's History Month: Julia Alvarez

One of the group of recent Latina writers to add her voice to the American pantheon, Dominican Julia Alvarez is proud of her peers such as Sandra Cisneros. While she has yet to reach the same level of acclaim as Cisneros, she has been much heralded for her fiction, most notably How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent.

Her poetry, while not quite as well known, is just as interesting. One thing that makes Alvarez's poetry interesting is that she often works in or adapts traditional forms, such as in her "Bilingual Sestina." The Woman I Kept To Myself, her 2004 collection of poetry, is composed entirely of a nonce form of her own creation; each poem is made up of three ten line stanzas. Within this framework she is able to carve out a place for female discourse, and within that space a niche for specifically Latina discourse as well.