Kirstin Valdez Quade is an American writer.
Early life and education Quade was born to a white father and a Hispanic mother in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her father Jay Quade was a desert geologist and her family lived throughout the Southwestern United States as well as in Australia. She attended Phillips Exeter Academy and earned her BA from Stanford University and her MFA from the University of Oregon. From 2009 to 2011 she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, where she also taught as a Jones Lecturer. In 2014–15, she was the Delbanco Visiting professor of Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. She is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at Princeton University and will be returning to Stanford University in the Fall 2023.
Career Quade's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Narrative Magazine, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Her writing weaves together themes of family, race, class, and coming-of-age, and unfold in New Mexico landscapes inspired by the author's own upbringing.
Her debut short story collection, Night at the Fiestas, received critical praise and won awards. A review in The New York Times labeled her stories "legitimate masterpieces" and called the book a "haunting and beautiful debut story collection." The Five Wounds, her debut novel, was published in 2021. The novel was shortlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. She was a 2021 James Merrill Fellow in Stonington, Connecticut.
Awards and honors
Literary awards YearWorkAwardResult2013Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award"Nemecia"Narrative Prize2014PEN/O. Henry StoriesNight at the FiestasNational Book Foundation"5 Under 35 Award"2015 National Book Critics Circle Award John Leonard Prize Southwest Books of the Year — 2016 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction — Young Lions Fiction Award — 2021The Five WoundsCenter for Fiction First Novel Prize 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Fiction Aspen Words Literary Prize — BookTube Prize Fiction Lambda Literary Award Lesbian Fiction Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award — Maya Angelou Book Award — Rosenthal Family Foundation Award — VCU Cabell First Novelist Award —
Honors
2009–2011 Wallace Stegner Fellow 2021 James Merrill Fellow
Bibliography
References
External links
Profile on Goodreads Profile at Lannan Foundation Faculty profile at the Lewis Center for the Arts Faculty profile at Stanford University Profile at Princeton University Humanities Council "Best Advice" at Narrative Magazine Interview with NPR Interview with Center for Fiction