Carlsbad Reads Together is an annual city-wide event held every April that connects the entire community through reading and special programming and events.

This year, please join the Library for a fascinating evening with great American poet, novelist, and essayist Julia Alvarez, as she discusses this year’s selection, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, in conversation with Susan McBeth.

Registration

This event is free and open to the public, with seating offered on a first-come, first-served basis.

As this event is expected to sell out, please plan to arrive early to obtain your numbered seating ticket. For questions about the event and seating, please contact the Carlsbad Public Library.

 Books are available for pre-order below and will be delivered to the event for signing. Books will also be available for purchase and signing at the event.

About the Author and Book

Julia Alvarez was born in New York City in 1950, Her parents returned to their native country, Dominican Republic, shortly after her birth.  Ten years later, the family was forced to flee to the United States because of her father’s involvement in a plot to overthrow the dictator, Trujillo.

Julia has written novels (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 (Homecoming, The Other Side/ El Otro Lado, The Woman I Kept to Myself), nonfiction (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 awards include the Pura Belpré and Américas Awards for her books for young readers, the Hispanic Heritage Award, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award.  In 2013, she received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama.

In 2024, she was the subject of an American Masters documentary, “Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined,” on PBS. Alvarez is one of the founders of Border of Lights, a movement to promote peace and collaboration between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  She lives in Vermont.

In her most recent novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, returns with a luminescent novel about storytelling that reads like an instant classic. Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of the book, doesn’t want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories—literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her.

Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas and soon begin to defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves.

The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks: Whose stories get to be told, and whose buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories. Julia Alvarez reminds us that the stories of our lives are never truly finished, even at the end.

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