It’s the birthday of Julia Alvarez (b. 1950), who began writing at a time when Latino writers were getting zero attention in the U.S. but whose debut novel more than 20 years later, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent, was a huge success.

Alvarez was born in New York City but spent her first 10 years in the Dominican Republic, until her parents had to flee the country because of her father’s involvement in the movement against Trujillo’s regime. They returned to New York City, where Alvarez had to struggle with the language. While she’d always loved storytelling, she credits coming to the U.S. for her love of reading and writing: for the first time, stories were written down rather than told.

Alvarez graduated from Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont, in 1971 and got an M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University in 1975. She began teaching to support herself, first as a writer-in-residence for various programs for elementary schools and senior citizens, then at a private boarding school (grades 9-12), and then at several universities. She landed back at Middlebury College and received tenure in the English Department in 1991, the same year she published How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. Within several years she gave up tenure and became a writer-in-residence instead, which allows her to write full-time while still teaching from time to time. She lives on a farm in Vermont with her husband, Bill Eichner, with whom she started a sustainable farm-literacy center in the Dominican Republic that grows organic, shade-grown coffee. Alvarez wrote an “eco-fable” about this project called A Cafecito Story (2001).

Alvarez has written four more adult novels, including In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), about the assassination of the Mirabal sisters who led the movement against Trujillo that her father was involved in; ¡Yo! (1997); In the Name of Salomé (2000); and Saving the World (2006). She has also published several books of poetry and nonfiction, children’s picture books, and books for middle grade readers, including the Tía Lola stories. One of her most recent books is nonfiction, A Wedding in Haiti: The Story of a Friendship (2012).

On November 19, 2015, Huffington Post published a list called “23 Books by Latinos That Might Just Change Your Life.” The first book on the list is How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent.

(Wow. Short post today. Should I stall? Should I offer elevator music? Whenever I think of elevator music, I get “Girl from Ipanema” in my head. It’s kind of my go-to private elevator music. So there’s that.)

Have a splendid, slightly warmer Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.