Kali Fajardo-Anstine (born November 9, 1986) is an American novelist and short story writer from Denver, Colorado. She won the 2020 American Book Award for Sabrina & Corina: Stories and was a 2019 finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Her first novel, Woman of Light: A Novel (2022), is a national bestseller and won the 2023 WILLA Literary Award in Historical Fiction. She is the 2022–2024 Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow.
Early life
Kali Fajardo-Anstine was born in Denver, Colorado in 1986. She is the second eldest of six siblings, five sisters and one brother.[1]
She struggled with depression[2] growing up because she didn’t feel she fit in culturally or socially with her peers, and turned to books and writing for comfort.[3]
After being pushed to leave high school by an unsupportive English teacher, Fajardo-Anstine dropped out and earned her GED. She worked as a bookseller in Denver while studying English and Chicano/a studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver, where she first began to write early drafts of short stories.[3]
In 2019, her debut collection of short stories, Sabrina & Corina, was published by Random House. The book, set in Denver, focuses on Chicanas of mixed ancestry. The stories deal with themes of abandonment, heritage, home, and the lives of women and girls.[5] Much of Fajardo-Anstine's work focuses on the experiences of women. In Poets & Writers in 2022, Fajardo-Anstine recalled strangers dismay at the size of her family. "My parents had six daughters and only one son. I remember people saying they felt sorry for my parents for having so many girls. There was an awful subtext there, that our lives as daughters weren’t as valuable as sons.”[6]
In 2022, after over a decade of research on her family history in Colorado, Fajardo-Anstine published her debut novel, Woman of Light.The Guardian described the novel as, "a feat of old school storytelling."[7] She credited her great aunt Lucy Lucero as an inspiration for the main character Luz Lopez. The for the novel came to her while sitting in her great aunt's home and listening to her stories, which have been excluded from traditional histories.[1]
Fajardo-Anstine at the 2022 Texas Book Festival.
Fajardo-Anstine is a mixed-race Chicana woman with Indigenous, Jewish, and Filipino ancestry. On Latino USA in 2022, she said of her work, "I could never pick up a book, turn on the TV, listen to the radio, and find people like us allowed to talk about the nuance of their identity... Everything was always sort of neatly put into categories and those categories did not represent who we were.”[8]
Fajardo-Anstine is inspired by the absence of Chicano or Latinx culture in the histories or narratives of the American West. In the Denver Public Library Western Genealogy Archives and most other traditional archives, White history is overrepresented. She found relics like an infant-size Ku Klux Klan robe with initials stitched in, yet she could not find information about indigenous and native Americans of Mexican descent. She saw that City of Denver's report on Mexican American/Chicano/Latino history in Denver had listed her great aunt Lucero's home as an important site, but there was no attribution to Lucero's daughter or other family members who shared stories about the home. The report also misspelled Lucero's name, and her family asked that information be removed.[1][9]
