Ask Weybridge, Vt., writer Julia Alvarez how her prolific career took root and she’ll dig back seven decades to her 1950s childhood, when she memorized verses recalled in her later poem, “Recitation.”

Here I am starting again where I first began,

in a pink party dress with a flaring crinoline,

waiting to entertain my mother’s friends

after their afternoon game of canasta …

The 76-year-old recipient of a National Medal of Arts from former President Barack Obama is “one of the main Latin American writers of her generation” if not “perhaps the most important of her time in the English-speaking language,” according to the National Endowment for the Humanities.

But when the onetime Dominican Republic schoolgirl was studying for a master’s degree in the United States, she often felt intimidated by seemingly more well-read peers.

“All I knew were the poems we were brought out to recite when there was company, and I was embarrassed to say that,” she said in a recent interview. “And then I realized that’s my literary ancestry — an oral culture rich in rhythmic incanted language.”

A lifetime later, Alvarez has collected her own verse into a new career-spanning anthology, “Visitations.” Publishers Weekly calls it “vivid and arresting.” Literary Hub named it one of the “Most Anticipated Books of 2026.” The writer, for her part, considers it more a work in progress.

“Maybe it has to do with age, but I don’t have anything to prove,” said the Middlebury College professor emerita and author of 25 books. “This wasn’t just collecting my own little keepsakes, but revisiting and revising them. Once I started, I saw some were still speaking to me and each other. I felt a quickening, a visitation.”

Raised in the Caribbean, Alvarez was 10 when her family fled after her father was part of a failed plot to overthrow a dictator. Arriving in New York City, the Spanish speaker was drowned out by a tsunami of English.

“I developed fluency by memorizing every poem I loved,” she writes in the 90-page anthology.

Alvarez earned a bachelor’s degree from Middlebury in 1971 and a master’s in creative writing from Syracuse University in 1975, then published her first book, the poetry collection “Homecoming,” in 1984. She was working as a “migrant poet” in schools across the country when her Vermont alma mater offered her a one-year job.

“It turned tenure track,” she recalled, “but they said, ‘You’ll need a book, a serious new book.’”

At age 41, Alvarez turned her family’s immigration story into a semi-autobiographical first novel, 1991’s “How the García Girls Lost Their Accents,” which Library Journal later named one of its “21 Classics for 21st Century.” Since then, she has written seven more novels, three nonfiction books, five poetry collections and nine works for children — the latter coming alongside the 2021 debut of an official look-alike Barbie doll.

Alvarez recently faced writing challenges when a detached retina clouded her sight, but she never lost the vision for her most recent novel, 2024’s “The Cemetery of Untold Stories.” After its publication, her literary agent suggested a retrospective of poems.

“I still begin each writing day by reading poetry,” she says in it, “much the way a choir director blows a note or a tune before the choir starts singing.”

Alvarez foraged through boxes, folders and notebooks to find past works.

“I can’t work with a poem on a screen,” she said.

Alvarez opens the anthology with “Recitation,” then moves on to revisit — and often rework — nearly a half-century of her life-inspired verse.

“I used to get so frustrated reading my own books after they were published because I’d think, ‘How could I have let that go by?’ Now I think, ‘This means you’ve grown as a writer. You’re able to see and revise things in ways you didn’t have the capacity to before.’”

Alvarez’s seemingly constant tweaks as she assembled “Visitations” challenged her agent.

“At some point he said, ‘You can’t change that. It’s gone to print.’”

That didn’t stop her as she went on to record the audiobook.

“Already I was revising it. I can’t help myself. But sometimes you should just leave it alone. You wrote something you didn’t even know you knew, given to you by, call it the muse, call it a conjunction of different things coming through you, high bars that you feel great gratitude and humility for.”

Alvarez was set to cap the anthology with “Muse Sighting in Matanzas,” a 1998 work about witnessing an older woman recite a verse.

… She had carried that poem

since childhood, as she dusted and swept, taught sums,

endured the cruel subtractions of a hard life,

finding her way by the light of those memorized lines …

“Then I thought, no, we’re living in a time when you can’t not be aware and present to what’s happening beyond those magical moments, those places where you have to keep that hope going.”

And so the latter work is followed by “I Go Through the House, Turning Off Lights,” a 2024 poem in which she recounts the end of a recent evening that mixed fellowship and worries about the future.

What’s ahead? Alvarez doesn’t offer answers, just more questions.

“I’m eager to find out what are the stories that help us move through this landscape of aging,” the self-described aspiring “elder” said. “I’m also asking in these times we are living, ‘What can I contribute that’s a spark of joy?’”

Alvarez’s search has led her to local No Kings rallies.

“To be there with neighbors and kids running about and dogs with protest signs on them, signs full of poetry, full of imagination, people just coming together and creating community … It’s important.”

Alvarez recalls how the late U.S. Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz, who first taught at Bennington College and lived to age 100, wrestled with concerns he wasn’t advocating enough.

“And then he realized that to live as a poet in the modern superstate is a kind of political act.”

Alvarez cites the late Emily Dickinson’s verse about the power of poetry, “I dwell in Possibility.”

“You don’t have to be out with a sign or storming the barricades,” the Vermonter said. “That winged life that stirs within us, to keep that going and to not let that die, is a protest.”

Alvarez presented her latest book this week at Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater. She’ll then be ready to record whatever arises next.

“My mother would sometimes say to me, ‘When are you going to stop writing?’ I would say, ‘Mommy, when am I going to stop breathing?’ When they ring me out, I don’t want there to be a drop of story left in me. I write now because it’s a way of life. I’m always learning something.”

This story was republished with permission from VtDigger, which offers its reporting at no cost to local news organizations through its Community News Sharing Project. To learn more, visit vtdigger.org/community-news-sharing-project.