Dominican Writers at Poets House: Julia Álvarez
EDITORIAL DESIGN, 2020
For this project, I was asked to visit different libraries in NYC, choose a theme based on something interesting I found in one of them, and create a book that explores visual narrative. I went to Poets House and found a couple of poetry collections by Julia Álvarez, a poet, novelist, essayist, and fellow Dominican. Álvarez was forced to flee the Dominican Republic with her family when she was ten years old due to her father's involvement in a plot to overthrow the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the 1960s.
Trujillo’s dictatorship and her family’s exile is a recurring theme in her work, which she explores in her poems: Samán, Museo del Hombre and Exile, from her poetry collections The Woman I Kept to Myself (2004) and The Other Side (1995), both found at Poets House. I created a visual narrative book that serves as a timeline touching on the historical context behind these poems: the final years of Trujillo's dictatorship, and her family's life during that time.
8 x 10 in | 56 pages
The texture was hand-made with gouache and photographed for the book design.