Julia Alvarez's "A Wedding In Haiti"

By Roger Annis
Seattle, April 21, 2012--Yesterday evening, I attended a reading at the Seattle public library by author Julia Alvarez of her new book 'A Wedding in Haiti.' One hundred people were on hand. The book tells the story of the Haitian people that the author and her husband, Bill Eichner, have come to know through their support of a successful coffee enterprise in the Dominican Republic, Cafe Alta Gracia.

In a review published in The Seattle Times, April 15, 2012, Agnes Torres Al-Shibibi writes, "Julia Alvarez's "A Wedding in Haiti" is a touching, funny, eye-opening and uplifting memoir, and a rare intimate look at our poorest neighbor in the Western Hemisphere..."

Alvarez is a DR-born writer living on a small farm with her husband in Vermont. She is a retired professor of literature at Vermont's Middlebury College and now an author in residence there. Small world.
 
The author did not go into much detail of the situation in Haiti, claiming, too modestly, that she is not an expert or 'talking head' on the country. She nonetheless expressed to the audience an extraordinary sensitivity and understanding of the plight of the Haitian people. She linked the situation of Haiti's poor quite powerfully to that of the poor in the U.S., talking, for example, of the significance of the Occupy movement and of the plight of Mexican laborers she has come to know on remote Vermont dairy farms. The laborers can't leave the farms because they would stand out too much in racially-profiled Vermont and risk being detained by cops for harassment or deportation.Their jobs are lifelines for their families back in Mexico.
 
Bill Eichner joined the discussion period with his own, perceptive views of the situation in Haiti.
 
To find out more about Alvarez's book and to read about here upcoming speaking events in the U.S., go here: http://www.juliaalvarez.com/news/events.php.