This is a selection for the Best of 2024 of First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing. Julia Alvarez has written novels including How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, ¡Yo!, In the Name of Salomé, Saving the World, Afterlife, collections of poems including Homecoming, The Other Side/ El Otro Lado, The Woman I Kept to Myself, nonfiction works including Something to Declare, Once Upon A Quinceañera, and A Wedding in Haiti, and numerous books for young readers including the Tía Lola Stories series, Before We Were Free, finding miracles, Return to Sender and Where Do They Go? Her new novel is The Cemetery of Untold Stories.  In 2013, she received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama. We talked about Julia's childhood, her parents reaction to her fiction, telling stories, aging, creativity, the stories we can pass on, and writing craft. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices