Come hear from GrubStreet’s 2025 Literary Ambassador: Kali Fajardo-Anstine! Kali is the author of the national bestselling novel Women of Light and the award-winning story collection Sabrina and Corina. Moderated by critically acclaimed author Melissa Rivero, in this event Kali will share learnings from her journey as a writer, her path—including successes and challenges—to publication, and what aspiring writers should keep in mind when embarking on their own journeys.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine is the nationally bestselling author of the novel Woman of Light (Random House, 2022), winner of the Reading the West Award in Fiction, the Women Writing the West Willa Award in Historical Fiction, and nominated for the Colorado Book Award, the Carol Shields Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Fajardo-Anstine’s first book is the widely acclaimed short story collection Sabrina & Corina (Random House, 2019), a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Bingham Prize, the Story Prize, the Saroyan International Prize, and winner of a American Book Award and a Reading the West Award in Fiction. Her honors include awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Denver Mayor’s office. She was the 2022 - 2024 Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University. Translated into numerous languages, her work has been published in Japanese, Italian, German, Slovenian, Spanish, and Turkish. Born in Denver, Colorado, Fajardo-Anstine holds an MFA from the University of Wyoming, and she worked for over a decade as an independent bookseller at West Side Books in North Denver.

Melissa Rivero is the author of The Affairs of the Falcóns, which won the 2019 New American Voices Award and a 2020 International Latino Book Award. The book was also longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Her most recent novel, Flores and Miss Paula, is a finalist for the Gotham Book Prize. Born in Lima, Peru and raised in Brooklyn, she is a graduate of NYU and Brooklyn Law School, where she was an editor of the Brooklyn Law Review. She lives in New York City with her family.

The Author's Journey: A GrubStreet Literary Ambassador Event