Julia Alvarez

I came with my very Dominican parents to the United States when great changes were taking place in this culture: among them, the women’s movement and the civil rights movement. My parents, being immigrants, couldn’t help me navigate in this new world. Where I found my way was here at Middlebury College as an undergraduate. It was here that I committed myself to my writing as a vocation. That gift was nurtured in me by my professors. They became my intellectual parents, who helped me find my voice as a young writer and as a young person, and for years afterwards I stayed in touch with those teachers.

Middlebury College was always home to me, a place that, as Frost said, “when you go there, they have to take you in.” Middlebury always took me in — through positions at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and attendance at the School of English. Ultimately, the College offered me a teaching position in the English department.

I taught here full-time, got full professorship, and then my writing took off. I’d always been a teacher who wrote on the side, and now I wanted to be a writer who taught on the side. I’ve stayed on as a resource for students, for the writing students and the Latino students. Every time I see a young person on campus from a completely different culture, who may not have met someone to trust yet, I remember how important my Middlebury teachers were to me. You can never pay back what people give you; you can only pass it on. So I try to pass it on to our students in some way.