Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Kali Fajardo-Anstine is the nationally bestselling author of the novel Woman of Light (Random House, 2022), winner of the Reading the West Award in Fiction, the Women Writing the West Willa Award in Historical Fiction, and nominated for the Colorado Book Award, the Carol Shields Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Fajardo-Anstine’s first book is the widely acclaimed short story collection Sabrina & Corina (Random House, 2019), a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Bingham Prize, the Story Prize, the Saroyan International Prize, and winner of a American Book Award and a Reading the West Award in Fiction. In 2023, Fajardo-Anstine’s introduction to Willa Cather’s beloved classic Death Comes for the Archbishop was published by Penguin Classics. Fajardo-Anstine’s honors include awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Denver Mayor’s office. She is the 2022 - 2024 Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University. Fajardo-Anstine has received fellowships from Yaddo (2017, 2021), MacDowell (2018, 2021), Hedgebrook, and Tin House. Her writing has appeared in the The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, ELLE, O the Oprah Magazine, The American Scholar, Boston Review, and elsewhere. Translated into numerous languages, her work has been published in Japanese, Italian, German, Slovenian, Spanish, and Turkish.Born in Denver, Colorado, she is the second eldest of seven siblings. Fajardo-Anstine dropped out of high school weeks into her senior year, earning her GED and going on to graduate with a BA in English and Minor in Chicana/o Studies from Metropolitan State University of Denver. She holds an MFA from the University of Wyoming and worked for over a decade as an independent bookseller at West Side Books in North Denver.
Woman of Light
Kali Fajardo-Anstine
A dazzling epic of betrayal, love, and fate that spans five generations of an Indigenous Chicano family in the American West, from the author of the National Book Award Finalist Sabrina & Corina
"There is one every generation--a seer who keeps the stories."
Luz "Little Light" Lopez, a tea leaf reader and laundress, is left to fend for herself after her older brother, Diego, a snake charmer and factory worker, is run out of town by a violent white mob. As Luz navigates 1930's Denver on her own, she begins to have visions that transport her to her Indigenous homeland in the nearby Lost Territory. Luz recollects her ancestors' origins, how her family flourished and how they were threatened. She bears witness to the sinister forces that have devastated her people and their homelands for generations. In the end, it is up to Luz to save her family stories from disappearing into oblivion.
Written in Kali Fajardo-Anstine's singular voice, the wildly entertaining and complex lives of the Lopez family fill the pages of this multigenerational western saga. Woman of Light is a transfixing novel about survival, family secrets, and love, filled with an unforgettable cast of characters, all of whom are just as special, memorable, and complicated as our beloved heroine, Luz.
Sabrina & Corina
Kali Fajardo-Anstine
A haunting debut story collection on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands, centered on Latinas of indigenous ancestry that shines a new light on the American West.
Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit. Set against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado–a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite–these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.
In “Sugar Babies,” ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth but tend to rise during land disputes. “Any Further West” follows a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In “Tomi,” a woman leaves prison and finds herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of the one she remembers from her childhood. And in the title story, “Sabrina & Corina,” a Denver family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual.
Sabrina & Corina is a moving narrative of unrelenting feminine power and an exploration of the universal experiences of abandonment, heritage, and an eternal sense of home.
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