Celebrated writer Julia Alvarez, author of In

On Sunday, the Lawrence Public Library will wrap up this season’s Read Across Lawrence and National Endowment for the Arts’ Big Read programming with a visit from acclaimed author Julia Alvarez.

During her appearance, slated for 7 p.m. at the Lied Center, Alvarez will discuss some of the books (she’s written 19, plus three collections of poetry) that have earned her two Pura Belpre honors and the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature, among others, as well as the National Medal of Arts in 2014. In particular, she’ll focus on “In the Time of the Butterflies” and “Return to Sender,” the library’s Read Across Lawrence picks for adults and teens, respectively.

First published in 1994, Alvarez’s historical novel “Butterflies” tells the story of the real-life Mirabal sisters, who became political martyrs in the 1960s after speaking out against dictator Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, where Alvarez spent part of her childhood. In advance of her Lawrence visit, Alvarez spoke with the Journal-World about growing up between two cultures, literature as a “portable homeland,” and the changing landscape of children’s books.

The following is an edited and condensed version of that conversation. Sunday’s talk at the Lied Center (doors open at 6 p.m.) is free and open to the public. For more information, visit www.lawrence.lib.ks.us.

Your family was forced to flee to the United States (from the Dominican Republic) because of your father’s involvement in an attempt to overthrow Trujillo. To what extent were you aware of the Mirabal sisters when you were growing up?

Not at all. They had started the underground, but theirs was the central region — that cell, as they were known, and my father was the cell in the capital. I really didn’t know, of course, about my father’s involvement. They didn’t tell kids stuff like that, and everything was top secret, so I never heard of them. It was only when their death was reported and I saw it in a TIME magazine article, and we were already in New York, that I began to ask my father questions. And so, it was really the story of my parents’ generation and what they went through in the dictatorship that is the time period of the novel, more than my own.

Do you see yourself as more of an immigrant than a refugee? How important is the distinction between the two?

It’s funny because these terms are often so imprecise. I was actually born in the United States, so I’m actually not technically an immigrant. But when I was 1 month old my parents went back (to the Dominican Republic), and so, really, I didn’t know this world at all — sort of like the DREAM kids that are brought here when they’re several months old (or) a few years old, and they grow up here. They don’t know anything else. So to me, I was Dominican. Mine was an immigrant experience that was also slash a refugee experience. They sort of meld into each other.

In a sense, coming to the United States was the opportunity for me to land in what really became my homeland — language and writing. So, in a way I was coming home, but it wasn’t the physical space so much as it was the opportunity that the space provided me to become a reader and writer and discover that calling in myself to become a storyteller. So, there are many different threads that go in, but always, because that was my first culture — the culture where my family for centuries had been, the place where most of my extended family still lives — there’s a way in which it’s home. I have a deep-roots system there that I can’t ever forget.

You’ve said that literature has served you throughout your life as this sort of “portable homeland.”

It wasn’t when we came (to the U.S.), because I wasn’t a reader at all. That happened because of all the different circumstances — learning a new language, becoming a reader, discovering books. Also, the experience of feeling like an outcast and the bullying that went on made me want to search for someplace to belong, and I discovered it in the world of the imagination. Since that time that I’d discovered reading, it became really the place that I felt the most at home with. So, I think it wasn’t maybe from the very beginning, but it was one of the unexpected opportunities that came out of the difficulties of that transition. Having lost everything, I was desperate to find something, and I wasn’t raised as a person that would be a reader or get much of an education as a female in that culture and time period. But coming here allowed me to evolve that part of myself, and to discover something that became really a lifesaver — stories and the imagination.

What were some of the books and authors that got you through that tough transition?

It maybe isn’t great literature, but I remember the “Nancy Drew” mysteries. Here was a smart young woman who drove her own car and had a boyfriend and solved mysteries. I was mesmerized. It was not too tough a jump once I was in high school to start reading the Jane Austen novels. It just felt like a natural evolution there — other smart girls in a different time period and trapped in the different limitations of women in their time, but smart and able to sort of navigate their way, at least in their small, little world.

Also, poetry. That was my first, greatest love — Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson — and I think it’s because poetry is English that’s more musical. It reminded me of my Spanish. Reading Langston Hughes in the school anthology, I remember vividly. “Little Women” was another wonderful book, because these were models for me that hadn’t been provided by my culture or family — of girls that were smart, of girls that got educations and did exciting things. Those weren’t the traditional roles for girls in my culture and my time in that country, which were to get married, usually in their teens, and to start families. That and becoming a nun, you know.

Some of those protagonists in the books you mentioned, Elizabeth Bennett and Jo March, and some of the women in your books as well, fit this sort of literary archetype of the “Strong Female Character.” Are you at all tired of that phrase at this point?

My characters are sometimes strong, but, more importantly, they’re human and they’re flawed and they fail. They’re maybe struggling to come to realize themselves within the stories that I’m telling. I’m not limited — or, I hope — to just females or just Latinos. I don’t purposefully limit myself, in other words, to a certain kind of story or a certain kind of character. The minute someone draws a circle around me and says, “this is your territory,” there’s an impish part of me that wants to cross that border and figure out what’s on the other side, you know?

I never used to write books for kids, and somebody asked me, “Have you ever thought about writing a book about the dictatorship for young readers?” I said, “Oh, I don’t write for young readers,” and the minute I said that, I had to figure out if I could. So, I think that there’s that desire to keep pushing and learning things. It’s funny, because oftentimes people think that writers write because they know things. I think writers mostly write because they want to find things out. So, I’m interested in being a human being.

Do you think representation of Latinos and Latinas in children’s books has improved at all since your debut in children’s literature?

I think I have seen a great change, but there’s still work to be done. For centuries, literature was American literature. Langston Hughes has that poem, “I, Too,” where he felt he was sent into the kitchen of minor writers as a black writer. But one of the things I have seen in my own lifetime is that bubble has been really popped. I see a lot of young, talented writers for children’s books, YA, adult novels, nonfiction, and it’s thrilling.

I think many of these writers have brought an infusion of energy and variety to American letters, which is really influencing even what you would have considered mainstream writers. That’s America, you know. That’s the energy of this country on so many levels — the energy of that diversity that comes in through immigration. It’s sort of the cycling of our culture as Americans, those periodic infusions and how they change us and we change them. The ones coming in are changed by being here, and they change the landscape here, and that’s wonderful.