Denver writer Kali Fajardo-Anstine will give a reading tonight in Laramie to promote her debut book, Sabrina & Corina.
Fajardo-Anstine dropped out of high school after a teacher told her she wasn't cut out for it. But then she got her GED, went to college, and eventually ended up in the University of Wyoming Master of Fine Arts creative writing program. Her family's been in Colorado for over a century, and almost all the stories in Sabrina and Corina are set there. Despite that, her work hasn't often been considered Western.
"I've always been considered a Latina writer, a Hispanic writer, a feminist writer, and a lot of these labels were applied to me before a Western place-based writer was ever applied to me,' Fajardo-Anstine says.
Fajardo-Anstine says she hopes to change how people think of Western writing, and elevate the stories of her ancestors.
"I come from ancient people from the southwest, and we didn't write books, we didn't keep records that way. But the way that we told our family history was through oral storytelling. And I like to say that my ancestors were essentially novelists who chronicled the lives of our family but they did so with the oral form."
She'll give a reading from her book tonight at 7 p.m. at Night Heron in Laramie.
