Julia Alvarez is the author of six novels, three books of nonfiction, three collections of poetry, and eleven books for children and young adults. In the Time of the Butterflies, which has more than one million copies in print, was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its Big Read program, and in 2013, President Obama awarded Alvarez the National Medal of Arts in recognition of her extraordinary storytelling. Her most recent novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, has just been published.