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Join us for a conversation with Kirstin Valdez Quade, author of Youth From Every Quarter from the 2021-22 Common Reading book, Tales of Two Americas.
Kirstin Valdez Quade’s most recent book is the novel The Five Wounds (W.W. Norton & Co., 2021), which Kirkus Reviews called “a brilliant meditation on love and redemption.” She is the author of the prize-winning short story collection Night at the Fiestas (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015), winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation. It was a New York Times Notable Book, and was named a best book of 2015 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the American Library Association. Quade is also the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and the 2013 Narrative Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Narrative, Guernica, The Southern Review, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She has received fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, as well as a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation.
When asked about the role faith plays in her fiction, Quade responded: “I think one of the reasons I'm interested in faith is that faith is so much about longing. It's about longing for transcendence, it's longing to be closer to the infinite and longing to connect with others; it's about empathy. And I think that's also the project of fiction. Fiction is about longing and empathy.”
Quade earned her B.A. from Stanford University and her M.F.A. in Fiction from the University of Oregon in 2009. She was also a Wallace Stegner and Truman Capote Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University, where she taught fiction and creative non-fiction. In 2014-15, she was the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan. Originally from New Mexico, she now lives in New Jersey and teaches at Princeton University.
More information on Tales of Two Americas and the Common Reading program can be found HERE.