Kirstin Valdez Quade is an American writer.
Quade was born to a white father and a Hispanic mother in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her father Jay Quade was a desert geologist and her family lived throughout the Southwestern United States as well as in Australia. She attended Phillips Exeter Academy and earned her BA from Stanford University and her MFA from the University of Oregon. From 2009 to 2011 she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, where she also taught as a Jones Lecturer. In 2014âÂÂ15, she was the Delbanco Visiting professor of Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. She is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at Princeton University and will be returning to Stanford University in the Fall 2023.
Quade's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Narrative Magazine, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Her writing weaves together themes of family, race, class, and coming-of-age, and unfold in New Mexico landscapes inspired by the author's own upbringing.
Her debut short story collection, Night at the Fiestas, received critical praise and won awards. A review in The New York Times labeled her stories "legitimate masterpieces" and called the book a "haunting and beautiful debut story collection." The Five Wounds, her debut novel, was published in 2021. The novel was shortlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. She was a 2021 James Merrill Fellow in Stonington, CT.