Before We Were Free (Author)

Julia Alvarez (born March 27, 1950) is a Dominican-American poet, novelist, and essayist best known for her novels How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), which explore themes of immigration, identity, and Dominican history. She has received numerous awards including the National Medal of Arts (2013), Pura Belpré Awards, Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature, and F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature.