For details contact: Beth Graham Public Relations Manager Phone: (210) 207-2638 Fax: (210) 207-2603 email: elizabeth.graham@sanantonio.gov
News Release	For Immediate Release July 25, 2007

What:	Meet the Author! Julia Alvarez, Once Upon a Quinceañera
Where:	Central Library Auditorium, 600 Soledad
When:	6:00 p.m. Wednesday, August 8

 Award-winning author Julia Alvarez will read from and sign copies of her new book Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the U.S.A. in the Central Library Auditorium at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, August 8. On her web site, Ms. Alvarez said of her new work, “It seemed to me that quinceañeras, those elaborate and ritualized parties thrown for young Latinas when they turn fifteen, are a perfect lens through which to view what is happening to us as a Latino community in this country. Writing the book also gave me the opportunity to review my own troubled coming of age and to understand why that passage was so difficult for me and many other young Latinas and women of my generation.”

Ms. Alvarez was born in New York City of Dominican parents. Her parents returned to the Dominican Republic when she was three months old and she lived there until the age of ten, when her father was forced to flee the country as a result of his involvement in the underground movement opposing the government of dictator Rafael Trujillo. Three sisters who were instrumental in the founding of that movement were later murdered by members of the Trujillo regime, and the incident became the basis of Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies. Other books by Julia Alvarez include How the García Girls Lost their Accent; Saving the World; A Cafecito Story; The Woman I Kept to Myself, a collection of poems; and numerous children’s books. Ms. Alvarez received the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Book Award for works which present a multicultural viewpoint for her authorship of How the García Girls Lost their Accent. She is writer-in-residence at Middlebury College in Vermont.

One hour of free parking is available in the Central Library parking garage with a validated ticket. For more information, the public may call 207-2500.

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