Julia Alvarez is a writer of novels, essays, books for young readers, and poetry. She is known for her books How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, and In the Time of Butterflies, which was made into a movie produced by and starring Salma Hayek, with Marc Anthony and Edward James Olmos. Her most recent book is A Wedding in Haiti: The Story of a Friendship.

Julia Alvarex and Bill Eichner, an ophthalmologist, collaborated on a farm in the Dominican Republic that grows organic coffee. They dream of enriching the human community, empowering farmers and their families to read and write, to feel pride in their stewardship of the land, and be paid fairly for their labor.