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J. Barbara Alvord
J. Barbara Alvord retired from the corporate world to write. Her poetry has been published in Lyrical Iowa, Byline and Cayuse Press zines: Retrozine and The Green Tricycle. One of ...view moreJ. Barbara Alvord retired from the corporate world to write. Her poetry has been published in Lyrical Iowa, Byline and Cayuse Press zines: Retrozine and The Green Tricycle. One of her plays, Due Time, has been performed at Iowa’s Living History Farms.
In 1992, as Barbara stood on Ellis Island pondering her grandmother’s name on the Immigrant Wall of Honor, she vowed to write Anna Mrkvièka’s courageous story. Anna was but a fourteen-year-old, meagerly-educated peasant girl in 1903 when she was sent without blood relatives from Europe to America.
Her journey included a daunting ocean trip in steerage, weeks at Ellis Island, and sleeping on steamy tenement rooftops of New York City’s Lower East Side. When she finally arrived to work on an isolated Iowa farm, she had no way to escape an abusive step-aunt, no pay, and little to eat. Yet Anna miraculously endured and brought her entire family to join her before World War I engulfed Europe.
After years of research, this creative biography was written to honor all immigrants like Anna. They struggled desperately to transplant their family lines to America— a precious gift to those of us so privileged to be citizens of this great land.view less