Description:

Please join us for the 16th annual Writers Festival, featuring renowned writers offering public readings!

This year's featured writers are Stephanie Griest, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and Airea D. Matthews.

May 6th reader: Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of The Five Wounds, winner of the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and the Maya Angelou Book Award. The Five Wounds was named a Best Book of 2021 by NPR, PBS News Hour, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, Booklist, and Book Riot. Kirstin’s story collection, Night at the Fiestas, won the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. It was named a New York Times Notable Book and a best book of 2015 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the American Library Association. Kirstin is the recipient of a Lannan Fellowship, the John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor at Stanford University.