Kirstin Valdez Quade

Kirstin Valdez Quade writes American fiction and teaches creative writing as an associate professor at Princeton University. The Five Wounds, her debut novel, follows five generations of the Padilla family through a difficult year in a small New Mexico town, balancing faith, parenthood, humor, and the possibility of change. It won both the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Rosenthal Family Foundation Award. Quade's earlier collection Night at the Fiestas received the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, establishing her reputation for precise stories rooted in New Mexican communities and complicated family loyalties.