Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Last updated

Kali Fajardo-Anstine
KFA LG-20-4.jpg
Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Born (1986-11-09) November 9, 1986 (age 38)
Denver, Colorado, U.S.
OccupationWriter
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.

Contents

Early life

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]

Career

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 at the 2022 Texas Book Festival. Kali Fajardo Anstine 2022 Texas Book Festival.jpg
Fajardo-Anstine at the 2022 Texas Book Festival.

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]

Selected works

Books

Short Stories

Essays

Criticism
Book Reviews

Awards and honors

Honors

Literary awards

YearTitleAwardCategoryResultRef
2019Sabrina & Corina National Book Award Fiction Shortlisted [16]
2020 American Book Award Won [17]
The Story Prize Shortlisted [18]
2023Woman of Light Carol Shields Prize for Fiction Longlisted [19]
Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize Longlisted [20]
Reading the WestWon [21]
WILLA Literary Award Historical FictionWon [22]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Willa Cather</span> American writer (1873–1947)

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.

<i>Death Comes for the Archbishop</i> 1927 novel by Willa Cather

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.

<i>A Lost Lady</i> 1923 novel by Willa Cather

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.

<i>My Ántonia</i> 1918 novel by Willa Cather

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reyna Grande</span> Mexican author (born 1975)

Reyna Grande is a Mexican-American author.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Olivas</span> American author and attorney (born 1959)

Daniel Anthony Olivas is an American author and attorney.

<i>One of Ours</i> 1922 novel by Willa Cather

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alicia Gaspar de Alba</span> American critic and writer

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edith Lewis</span> American magazine editor

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.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Monaghan, Shane (1 June 2022). "Inside Denver Author Kali Fajardo-Anstine's Much Anticipated Debut Novel". 5280. Colorado.
  2. Warner, Ryan (8 July 2022). "Denver novelist Kali Fajardo-Anstine on the decade it took to write 'Woman of Light'". Colorado Public Radio.
  3. 1 2 González, Rigoberto (1 June 2022). "Keeping the Stories: A Profile of Kali Fajardo-Anstine". Poets & Writers.
  4. Bohlen, Teague (3 April 2019). "Kali Fajardo-Anstine on Sabrina & Corina, Heritage and Home". Westword . Retrieved 18 October 2019.
  5. Turner, Elliott (8 April 2019). "Sabrina & Corina". Latino Book Review. Retrieved 18 October 2019.
  6. "Keeping the Stories: A Profile of Kali Fajardo-Anstine". Poets & Writers . 1 August 2022. Retrieved 14 April 2023.
  7. "Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine review – haunted by lost lands". The Guardian . 18 June 2022. Retrieved 21 April 2023.
  8. "Kali Fajardo-Anstine Reclaims Her Ancestors' Stories". Latino USA . 28 June 2022. Retrieved 23 April 2023.
  9. City of Denver. "Nuestras Historias: Mexican American/Chicano/Latino Histories in Denver An Historic Context" (PDF). Denver the Mile High City.
  10. Kali-Fajardo-Anstine-in-Praise-of-Willa-Cather-and-the-American-Southwest (24 September 2021). "Kali Fajardo-Anstine in Praise of Willa Cather and the American Southwest". lithub.com. Retrieved 20 June 2022.
  11. "Fiction Craft Seminar Summer 2021" (PDF). as.nyu.edu. 24 September 2021. Retrieved 20 December 2023.
  12. Tan, May-Lan (28 May 2019). "Debut Short Story Collections Unearth the Dark Underbellies of Relationships". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 19 October 2019.
  13. Sabrina & Corina: Stories. penguin random house. 2019.
  14. Fajardo-Anstine, Kali (2022). Woman of Light. Penguin Random House. ISBN   9780525511328.
  15. "Winners 2020-2029". American Academy of Arts and Letters. Retrieved 21 August 2023.
  16. Dwyer, Colin (20 November 2019). "National Book Awards Handed To Susan Choi, Arthur Sze And More". NPR . Archived from the original on 22 December 2023. Retrieved 22 December 2023.
  17. The Associated Press (15 September 2020). "George Takei, Ocean Vuong and more win American Book Awards". USA Today . Archived from the original on 22 December 2023. Retrieved 22 December 2023.
  18. "The Story Prize 2020". The Story Prize. Retrieved 22 September 2023.
  19. Deborah Dundas, "5 Canadians nominated for first Carol Shields Prize for Fiction for women and non-binary writers, worth $150,000 (U.S.)". Toronto Star , March 8. 2023.
  20. "Longlist for JCOP 2020-2029". New Literary Project. Retrieved 21 August 2023.
  21. "Reading the West Winner 2023". Reading the West. Retrieved 27 September 2023.
  22. "The WILLA Literary Award – Women Writing the West" . Retrieved 21 August 2023.