Stokes Center for Creative Writing Presents Spring Reading Series

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Posted on January 22, 2016

Alice Jackson

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Author Kirstin Valdez Quade, a rising star of American literature, will be the first guest for the 2016 Spring Reading Series, beginning Tuesday, Jan. 26, at the University of South Alabama.

Quade will speak about writing and read from her works, 4-5 p.m., in the USA Archaeology Museum. The event is free and open to the public.

The Spring Reading Series, sponsored by the University’s Stokes Center for Creative Writing, will host additional outstanding writers and poets as well as a graduate student reading series during the semester.

“We are committed to fostering a vibrant literary community in southern Alabama, one that showcases both local and national talent and provides a meeting place for writers at all levels,” said Mira Rosenthal, director of the Stokes Center for Creative Writing.

Quade, an assistant professor at Princeton University, is author of the critically acclaimed short story collection “Night at the Fiestas,” published in 2015 by W.W. Norton & Co. Each of the book’s stories explores the troubled hearts and lives of characters defined by a desire to escape the past or else to plumb its depths.

“Night at the Fiestas” was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, and Publisher’s Weekly called the debut book “an emotional tour de force.” New York Times critic Kyle Minor declared three of the book’s stories, set in northern New Mexico, to be “legitimate masterpieces.”

Quade is a recipient of the “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation as well as the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and the 2013 Narrative Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Narrative, Guernico, The Southern Review, The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She has received prestigious fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony as well as a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. She was a Wallace Stegner and Truman Capote Fellow at Stanford University, where she also taught as a Jones Lecturer. In 2014-2015, she was the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan.

To learn more about the Spring Reading Series and the Stokes Center for Creative Writing, visit its website.

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