What inspired you to write about the Mirabal sisters?

They were—the three who died—the ones who stayed and sacrificed their lives and brought freedom to the Dominican Republic. We were the ones that got away, my father, my mother, my sisters and myself. My father was part of the same group as the Mirabal sisters and we got out and they didn't get out. There's always the responsibility of the survivors to tell the story of those who didn't make it. People ask how long it took to write this book and I say, "all my life." November 25th is the date in all our minds, those who survived. It is an important that for us and to everyone. The United Nations has even declared November 25th the International Day Against Violence Against Women because of the Mirabal sisters.

How did you go about finding voices for the Mirabal sisters? What was the greatest challenge in bringing historical heroes alive in fiction?

That's such a mysterious process involved with anything I write. I don't know if it's going to be a live one until I have the voice. The whole tone and movement and vocabulary is the most important thing. I struggled with finding each sister's individual characteristics and even in the case of Marie Teresa, the different ways they would structure their stories. That's a good mysterious unanswerable question. Sometimes you have the story and you don't have the voice. A novel is truth according to character, so if there's no voice, there's no story.

The biggest challenge I find is the same with any character, however invented, is to saturate yourself, to become, in a way, that character. To saturate oneself in the creating of the character and putting them on paper. That's true of totally fictional or historical characters. You've got some of the facts, testimonies, points of view, and then you absorb all of this to turn it into something. Even if the character's a mandolin player and you absorb all that there is to know about mandolins, the challenge is to make that voice come alive on paper. With a historical character, it's just different kind of information that you have to give voice to, but it's still crystallizing all that material—whether it's a historical figure or details or story lines—and putting it together.

What are you working on now?

I just came back from a book tour with a new young adult title, Before We Were Free. The work was the second part of "book biz", as opposed to writing; the promoting and visiting bookstores and meeting readers, which is the best part. Basically introducing it to the world. Now, coming home, I'm working on a book of poems. And on finding an illustrator for a picture book for children, The Legend Of Altagratia, that's already written.