Kali Fajardo-Anstine | |
---|---|
Born | Denver, Colorado, U.S. | November 9, 1986
Occupation | Writer |
Education | Metropolitan State University of Denver (BA) University of Wyoming (MFA) |
Notable works | "Sabrina and Corina: Stories"; Woman of Light |
Notable awards | American Book Award Guggenheim Fellowship |
Kali Fajardo-Anstine (born November 9, 1986) is an American novelist and short story writer from Denver, Colorado. She won the 2020 American Book Award for Sabrina & Corina: Stories and was a 2019 finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Her first novel, Woman of Light: A Novel (2022), is a national bestseller and won the 2023 WILLA Literary Award in Historical Fiction. She is the 2022–2024 Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow.
Kali Fajardo-Anstine was born in Denver, Colorado in 1986. She is the second eldest of six siblings, five sisters and one brother. [1]
She struggled with depression [2] growing up because she didn’t feel she fit in culturally or socially with her peers, and turned to books and writing for comfort. [3]
After being pushed to leave high school by an unsupportive English teacher, Fajardo-Anstine dropped out and earned her GED. She worked as a bookseller in Denver while studying English and Chicano/a studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver, where she first began to write early drafts of short stories. [3]
In 2013, she earned a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from University of Wyoming, [1] where she studied under writers Brad Watson and Joy Williams. Her graduate thesis created the foundation for her award-winning debut collection, Sabrina & Corina. [1]
Fajardo-Anstine's work often features mixed-race, Latina and Native American women in Colorado and the American West. [4]
In 2019, her debut collection of short stories, Sabrina & Corina, was published by Random House. The book, set in Denver, focuses on Chicanas of mixed ancestry. The stories deal with themes of abandonment, heritage, home, and the lives of women and girls. [5] Much of Fajardo-Anstine's work focuses on the experiences of women. In Poets & Writers in 2022, Fajardo-Anstine recalled strangers dismay at the size of her family. "My parents had six daughters and only one son. I remember people saying they felt sorry for my parents for having so many girls. There was an awful subtext there, that our lives as daughters weren’t as valuable as sons.” [6]
In 2022, after over a decade of research on her family history in Colorado, Fajardo-Anstine published her debut novel, Woman of Light. The Guardian described the novel as, "a feat of old school storytelling." [7] She credited her great aunt Lucy Lucero as an inspiration for the main character Luz Lopez. The for the novel came to her while sitting in her great aunt's home and listening to her stories, which have been excluded from traditional histories. [1]
Fajardo-Anstine is a mixed-race Chicana woman with Indigenous, Jewish, and Filipino ancestry. On Latino USA in 2022, she said of her work, "I could never pick up a book, turn on the TV, listen to the radio, and find people like us allowed to talk about the nuance of their identity... Everything was always sort of neatly put into categories and those categories did not represent who we were.” [8]
Fajardo-Anstine is inspired by the absence of Chicano or Latinx culture in the histories or narratives of the American West. In the Denver Public Library Western Genealogy Archives and most other traditional archives, White history is overrepresented. She found relics like an infant-size Ku Klux Klan robe with initials stitched in, yet she could not find information about indigenous and native Americans of Mexican descent. She saw that City of Denver's report on Mexican American/Chicano/Latino history in Denver had listed her great aunt Lucero's home as an important site, but there was no attribution to Lucero's daughter or other family members who shared stories about the home. The report also misspelled Lucero's name, and her family asked that information be removed. [1] [9]
In 2023, Fajardo-Anstine wrote a new introduction to Willa Cather's classic novel Death Comes for the Archbishop that was published by Penguin Classics. [10]
Her work is often taught in high school and college classes throughout the United States. [11]
Year | Title | Award | Category | Result | Ref |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
2019 | Sabrina & Corina | National Book Award | Fiction | Shortlisted | [16] |
2020 | American Book Award | — | Won | [17] | |
The Story Prize | — | Shortlisted | [18] | ||
2023 | Woman of Light | Carol Shields Prize for Fiction | — | Longlisted | [19] |
Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize | — | Longlisted | [20] | ||
Reading the West | — | Won | [21] | ||
WILLA Literary Award | Historical Fiction | Won | [22] |
Willa Sibert Cather was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I.
Death Comes for the Archbishop is a 1927 novel by American author Willa Cather. It concerns the attempts of a Catholic bishop and a priest to establish a diocese in New Mexico Territory.
A Lost Lady is a 1923 novel by American writer Willa Cather. It tells the story of Marian Forrester and her husband, Captain Daniel Forrester, who live in the Western town of Sweet Water along the Transcontinental Railroad. Throughout the story, Marian—a wealthy married socialite—is pursued by a variety of suitors and her social decline mirrors the end of the American frontier. The work had a significant influence on F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby.
My Ántonia is a novel published in 1918 by American writer Willa Cather, which is considered one of her best works.
Dame Hermione Lee is a British biographer, literary critic and academic. She is a former President of Wolfson College, Oxford, and a former Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of New College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.
Reyna Grande is a Mexican-American author.
Daniel Anthony Olivas is an American author and attorney.
One of Ours is a 1922 novel by Willa Cather that won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. It tells the story of the life of Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska native in the first decades of the 20th century. The son of a successful farmer and an intensely pious mother, he is guaranteed a comfortable livelihood. Nevertheless, Wheeler views himself as a victim of his father's success and his own inexplicable malaise.
Alicia Gaspar de Alba is an American scholar, cultural critic, novelist, and poet whose works include historical novels and scholarly studies on Chicana/o art, culture and sexuality.
"Ardessa" is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published in Century in May 1918.
"The Joy of Nelly Deane" is a short story by American writer Willa Cather. It was first published in Century in October 1911.
"The Affair at Grover Station" is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published in Library in June 1900 in two installments, and reprinted in the Lincoln Courier one month later. The story is about a geological student asking an old friend of his about the recent murder of a station agent.
"The Namesake" is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published in McClure's in March 1907.
Edith Lewis was a magazine editor at McClure's Magazine, the managing editor of Every Week Magazine, and an advertising copywriter at J. Walter Thompson. Lewis was Willa Cather's domestic partner and was named executor of Cather's literary estate in Cather's will. After Cather's death, Lewis published a memoir of Cather in 1953 titled Willa Cather Living.
Hard Punishments, also sometimes referred to as Cather's Avignon story, is the final, unpublished, and since lost novel by Willa Cather, almost entirely destroyed following her death in 1947. It is set in medieval Avignon.
Deborah Martinez-Martinez is CEO of the publisher Vanishing Horizons and is an author who explores the history of the Southwestern United States. She worked in higher education admissions and recruitment for twenty years and advocates for more Chicanas in education.
Lucy Lucero was a Latina community leader in Denver, Colorado. Her home on Galapago St. was known as a haven for the Hispanic and Latino community, especially for young gay latinos who were ostracized from their own families. She was the great-aunt of author Kali Fajardo-Anstine.
Arlette Lucero is an American visual artist, educator, and illustrator.
Renee Fajardo is an author, educator, and activist in Denver, Colorado. She is currently a faculty in Chicano Studies at Metropolitan State University Denver. She is the mother of author Kali Fajardo-Anstine.
Jeanette Trujillo-Lucero is a dancer who has been recognized for her Spanish and folklore dances. She is the founder and artistic director of Fiesta Colorado Dance Company and Ballet Folklorico de Colorado. Her stage name is "La Muñeca" for her petite stature. Her dance background includes Mexican folklorico, classical Spanish dance, Flamenco, jazz, tap, and ballet.