Sabrina & Corina: Stories

Kali Fajardo-Anstine is the author of Sabrina & Corina, a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Bingham Prize, The Story Prize, and winner of an American Book Award. She is the 2021 recipient of the Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been honored with the Denver Mayor s Award for Global Impact in the Arts and the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association Reading the West Award. She has written for The New York Times, Harper s Bazaar, ELLE, The American Scholar, Boston Review, and elsewhere, and has received fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and Tin House. Fajardo-Anstine earned her MFA from the University of Wyoming and has lived across the country, from Durango, Colorado, to Key West, Florida. She is the 2022/2023 Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Texas State University. She is from Denver, Colorado.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST Latinas of Indigenous descent living in the American West take center stage in this haunting debut story collection a powerful meditation on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands. 

Here are stories that blaze like wildfires, with characters who made me laugh and broke my heart. Sandra Cisneros

WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR THE STORY PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE FOR DEBUT SHORT STORY COLLECTION

Kali Fajardo-Anstine s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.

In Sugar Babies, ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth but tend to rise during land disputes. Any Further West follows a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In Tomi, a woman leaves prison and finds herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of the one she remembers from her childhood. And in the title story, Sabrina & Corina, a Denver family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual.

Sabrina & Corina is a moving narrative of unrelenting feminine power and an exploration of the universal experiences of abandonment, heritage, and an eternal sense of home.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Public Library  Kirkus Reviews   Library Journal 

Sabrina & Corina isn t just good, it s masterful storytelling. Fajardo-Anstine is a fearless writer: her women are strong and scarred witnesses of the violations of their homelands, their culture, their bodies; her plots turn and surprise, unerring and organic in their comprehensiveness; her characters break your heart, but you keep on going because you know you are in the hands of a master. Her stories move through the heart of darkness and illuminate it with the soul of truth. Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

[A] powerhouse debut . . . stylistically superb, with crisp dialogue and unforgettable characters, Sabrina & Corina introduces an impressive new talent to American letters. Rigoberto González, NBC News