Kirstin Valdez Quade | Saints by Half: Retelling Saints' Lives

In this talk, Kirstin Valdez Quade will read from and discuss the story collection she is currently working on, a series of retellings of Catholic saints’ lives. In these stories, she carves out space in the old accounts to tell the stories of people whose lives have been omitted from the official and popular versions of events and explore complexities in stories that have been simplified by time and retelling.

About the Speaker

Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of The Five Wounds, which won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Lambda Literary Award. The Five Wounds was named Best Book of 2021 by NPR, PBS News Hour, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, Booklist, and Book Riot. Night at the Fiestas won prizes from the National Book Critics Circle, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor in Stanford’s Creative Writing Program.
 

About the Series

In 1891, thirty-five scholars gathered to form a community in a new university. In that spirit, this series welcomes new humanities senior faculty to the Stanford community to present their work. 

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