A Dominican American poet argued for poetry’s importance in connecting identities at a festival hosted by Georgetown University’s Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice on March 24. 

The Lannan Literary Festival, an annual three-day festival, invites prominent writers, artists and scholars to analyze literary developments at Georgetown. Hosted in collaboration with Georgetown’s Disability Cultural Center and the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, this year’s festival focused on how literature helps individuals navigate transformation and featured Julia Alvarez, a Dominican American poet, novelist and essayist. 

Alvarez said poetry has helped her reconcile her English and Spanish-speaking identities. 

“I loved poetry, because poetry to me was a way I could speak Spanish and English,” Alvarez said at the event. “It was a cadence in a musical and it reminded me of my native language.” 

Alvarez’s work draws on her experiences growing up between the Dominican Republic and the United States. She is the author of several acclaimed books, including “How the García Girls Lost Their Accents,” which won the New York Times Notable Book of 1991 and “In the Time of the Butterflies,” which explores family dynamics, immigrant diasporas and adolescent transformations. 

Alvarez said she tries to internalize poetry that resonates with her, memorizing it for future inspiration. 

“What I do when I love a poem is I try to commit it to memory because I want to have it inside me at that cellular level,” Alvarez said. “So I have a number of poems that are important to me, beginning with the one that’s an epigraph in the book.”

Alvarez’s “How the García Girls Lost Their Accents” follows four Dominican sisters navigating identity, family dynamics and coming of age after immigrating to the United States and has been translated into 11 languages across 15 countries since its publication. The novel cemented Alvarez — who later became a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College and received the National Medal of Arts — as a leading voice in Latino literature.

Alvarez said she has rituals and beliefs that guide her creative process and help her transition between projects. 

“I do have my rituals and I have my little icons,” Alvarez said. “And when a book is done, they have to go away and give me space. So I usually have a ritual of internment which brings me away.” 

Alvarez said reciting poems aloud helps her to hear the natural rhythms of language and experiment with voice and cadence. 

“When you live with the song and you see there’s a kind of tenderness and compassion for that moment — knowing that you didn’t know where this was going and I still don’t — you have to forget what you’ve done when you’re in the service of this new work,” Alvarez said. “And you have that feeling in your spine when you do a craft that you learn certain things on an almost cellular level.” 

Alvarez said her childhood experiences memorizing poetry shaped her understanding of language and community. 

“I really found rhythmically a connection with poetry,” Alvarez said. “And I would memorize a poem that I loved, because that was something that came from my childhood.” 

Alvarez said she wrote her novel “In the Time of the Butterflies” to better understand her parents’ generation and the experiences that shaped them.

“I feel like ‘In the Time of the Butterflies’ was the book I wrote for the Lost Generation because they came of age dreaming of dictatorship, censorship and fear,” Alvarez said. “And so I wanted to understand because I always thought, ‘why did you let this happen?’” 

Alvarez said she approached her work not just as a historical or intellectual exercise, but as a way to internalize her parents’ stories. 

“I wanted to understand my parents’ generation but I didn’t want to understand it intellectually,” Alvarez said. “I wanted to integrate it and the task of a writer is not to solve the problem, but to state it correctly. So I wanted to understand and have answers, but didn’t really want answers.” 

Alvarez said literature helps her feel connected with people through history and distance. 

“The one thing about stories of literature is that we’re all connected,” Alvarez said. “You can read the stories from 2500 B.C. and I’m in there in that story.”