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Kirstin Valdez Quade

Biography

Kirstin Valdez Quade

Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of THE FIVE WOUNDS and NIGHT AT THE FIESTAS, winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. She is the recipient of a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, the Rome Prize, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories and elsewhere. Originally from New Mexico, she now lives in New Jersey and teaches at Princeton University.

Kirstin Valdez Quade

Books by Kirstin Valdez Quade

The Five Wounds
by Kirstin Valdez Quade - Fiction

It’s Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and 33-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his 15-year-old daughter, Angel, shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans for personal redemption. With weeks to go until her due date, tough, ebullient Angel has fled her mother’s house, setting her life on a startling new path. THE FIVE WOUNDS spans the baby’s first year as five generations of the Padilla family converge: Amadeo’s mother, Yolanda, reeling from a recent discovery; Angel’s mother, Marissa, to whom Angel isn’t speaking; and disapproving Tíve, Yolanda’s uncle and keeper of the family’s history.

Night at the Fiestas: Stories
by Kirstin Valdez Quade - Fiction, Short Stories

Kirstin Valdez Quade's stories plunge us into the fierce, troubled hearts of characters defined by the desire to escape the past or else to plumb its depths. The deadbeat father of a pregnant teenager tries to transform his life by playing the role of Jesus in a bloody penitential Passion. A young man discovers that his estranged father and a boa constrictor have been squatting in his grandmother’s empty house. One girl attempts to uncover the mystery of her cousin's violent past, while another young woman finds herself at an impasse when she is asked to hear her priest's confession.