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Kali Fajardo-Anstine

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Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Born (1986-11-09) November 9, 1986 (age 38)
Denver, Colorado, U.S.
OccupationWriter
EducationMetropolitan State University of Denver (BA)
University of Wyoming (MFA)
Notable works"Sabrina and Corina: Stories"; Woman of Light
Notable awardsAmerican 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.

Early life

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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

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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.

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

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Books

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  • Sabrina & Corina: Stories (2019)[12][13]
  • Woman of Light: A Novel (2022)[14]

Short Stories

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Essays

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Criticism
Book Reviews

Awards and honors

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Honors

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Literary awards

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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]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e 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. ^ a b 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.
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