Kirstin Valdez Quade on The Five Wounds with Alice McDermott

In Conversation

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  Kirstin Valdez Quade

  Kirstin Valdez Quade

  Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of The Five Wounds and Night at the Fiestas, winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. She is the recipient of a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, the Rome Prize, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Originally from New Mexico, she now lives in New Jersey and teaches at Princeton University.

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  Alice McDermott

  Alice McDermott

  Alice McDermott’s critically acclaimed eighth novel, The Ninth Hour, was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award and The 2017 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and others named The Ninth Hour among the top works of fiction in 2017. In 2018, The Ninth Hour was awarded France’s Prix Femina for a work in translation. Her seventh novel, Someone, was a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the Dublin IMPAC Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Patterson Prize for Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Someone was also long-listed for the National Book Award. Three of her previous novels, After This, At Weddings and Wakes, and That Night, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Charming Billy won the National Book Award for fiction in 1998 and was a finalist for the Dublin IMPAC Award. That Night was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her stories, essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Harper’s, Commonweal, and elsewhere. She has received the Whiting Writers Award, the Corrington Award for Literary Excellence, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for American Literature, The Mary McCarthy Award from Bard College, and the 2019 Seamus Heaney Award from New York University. In 2013, she was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. For 23 years she was the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.