Night at the Fiestas

Kirstin Valdez Quade is a New Mexican author of mixed Hispanic and white heritage. The daughter of a desert geologist, she grew up partially in Albuquerque and partially in other areas of the Southwest where her father conducted geological research. Now a professor of Creative Writing at Stanford, Valdez Quade divides her time between writing and teaching. Night at the Fiestas (2015) was her first book, and she later published The Five Wounds (2021), a revision and expansion of the story of the same name that is featured in Night at the Fiestas. Valdez Quade’s work is deeply connected to the American Southwest, and she is interested in depicting different aspects of everyday life in this region.

Her writing is also powerfully tied to the cultural history of New Mexico in particular, and her work examines the people and spaces with which she first became familiar as a child in Albuquerque. New Mexico, is the ancestral homeland of several Indigenous nations, and it is a region in which the presence of Spanish settlers long predates the formation of the US as a country. Valdez Quade seeks to explore this history through her writing, and she has also spoken about the role of the Catholic Church in the brutal colonization of the Indigenous populations in what would become the state of New Mexico.