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Acknowledgments An edition of this kind never materializes without creating a number of personal and professional arrears. First, we owe a heartfelt debt of gratitude to our contributors. Your work makes this book. Thank you for your writing, your revisions, and for always meeting with good humor the tight deadlines we imposed. Second, we would like to thank the editors at the State University of New York Press—especially Beth Bouloukos, Mary Jo Bona, Rafael Chaiken, and Diane Ganeles—for their work on this volume. Beth believed in this project from its inception and gave us crucial support in moving it through the various channels; Rafael made important suggestions and caught all our errors, despite our best efforts not to have any. Had it not been for the assistance of our anonymous outside readers, this edition would not have cohered as it does now; simply put, their input made it a better book, and we are grateful. Thank you to our cover artist, and to Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill for allowing us to reprint images from In the Time of the Butterflies. Others helped along the way, too many to list by name, though we remain grateful to all and certainly will list a few. Thanks to Devoney Looser, who suggested SUNY as a good fit for this project and who has been one of Emily’s most important friends, professionally and personally, for more than a decade. Also, a big shout out to our assistants and graduate students, now known as Team Alvarez; without the support of you all—Josh Black, Shelley Decker, Kate Peterson, Krista Roberts, and Stephanie Urich—the vast amount of clerical work required to bring a project like this to fruition would have been much more onerous. Thank you. The University of West Georgia, our home institution, contributed to this piece in a number of ways. The Department of English ix Acknowledgments x and Philosophy invested in our research by gladly granting us necessary resources to complete the manuscript and by obviously caring about our work. We’re especially grateful to our colleagues for their expressions of professional and personal support. Our thanks, too, to the interdisciplinary committee of academics and staff, to administrators at the college and university levels, to Pearson Publishing (and especially our representative, Barbara Robinson), and to South Arts, a division of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Georgia Council for the Arts, for donating the money, time, and labor necessary to bring Julia Alvarez to our campus, a meeting out of which this project grew. And of course, our profound gratitude to Julia Alvarez herself, not simply for her rich and provocative writing, but also for providing gracious inspiration on her visit for this project. Finally, our sincere thanks to our support networks at home: I am deeply grateful to have had for the production of this text one of the best working partnerships I’ve ever experienced. Through all the messes of death and illness and shifting responsibilities at home and work, it’s been the truest pleasure. Rebecca and I discovered in writing the proposal and introduction together that our voices knit virtually seamlessly; this is how we worked, too, as if we were two limbs on a single tree moving in the same wind. Let’s do it again. Thank you to Becky and Joe Hogan, my mentors, who taught me to be an editor and a great deal else. My deepest gratitude goes to Chuck, forever jollying me out of some problem, making the sea smooth and the road straight: without you I would not have had the peace of mind and the intellectual space to have done this. Thank you.—Emily There are few words to express—at least ones that don’t evoke unicorns and rainbows—my appreciation and affection for my coeditor and dear friend who has impacted my life personally and professionally on so many levels. We sat in my office, I spoke of my admiration for Alvarez’s writing, and you made her appear. It was magic. Thank you. Without Tom and Pearl McHaney, my mentors and extended family, I wouldn’t be a teacher or scholar today; your influence impacts me daily, even years after being your student. And, most of all, an eternal thank you to my cherished three—Patrick, Samuel, and Ruby Erben; you are the people who bring joy into my life. No journey, professional or personal, would be possible or worthwhile without each...

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