Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

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You can pre-order The Five Wounds here.

We're thrilled to welcome Kirstin back to Collected Works!

It’s Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans for personal redemption. With weeks to go until her due date, tough, ebullient Angel has fled her mother’s house, setting her life on a startling new path.

Vivid, tender, funny, and beautifully rendered, The Five Wounds spans the baby’s first year as five generations of the Padilla family converge: Amadeo’s mother, Yolanda, reeling from a recent discovery; Angel’s mother, Marissa, whom Angel isn’t speaking to; and disapproving Tíve, Yolanda’s uncle and keeper of the family’s history. Each brings expectations that Amadeo, who often solves his problems with a beer in his hand, doesn’t think he can live up to.

The Five Wounds is a miraculous debut novel from a writer whose stories have been hailed as “legitimate masterpieces” (New York Times). Kirstin Valdez Quade conjures characters that will linger long after the final page, bringing to life their struggles to parent children they may not be equipped to save.

About the Author

Kirstin Valdez Quade received a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation as well as the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and the 2013 Narrative Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Narrative, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and is currently the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan.

About Denise Chavez

A true child of La Frontera, Chávez is a novelist, playwright, actor, community activist and teacher whose work focuses on the border corridor of southern New Mexico, West Texas, and Northern México. While her work is centered in this ever-challenged break between the worlds, her characters speak to universal themes. Chávez is the owner and bookseller at Casa Camino Real, a Bookstore and Multicultural Art and Community Center, on the Historic Camino Real. Chávez is a founding member of the American Booksellers Diversity, Inclusion, and Equality Committee. Since May 2018, Chávez has distributed books in Spanish as well as bilingual English/Spanishbooks to Refugee, Asylum and Migrant families on the U.S./México border in Las Cruces, New Mexico, El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, México in a program called Libros Para El Viaje/Books for the Journey, in collaboration with the American Booksellers Association and with Border Servant Corps in Las Cruces. Thousands of books have been donated by publishers, bookstores, booksellers, writers, artists, agents, filmmakers and hundreds of readers and sponsors.

Chávez’s books include The King and Queen of Comezón, A Taco Testimony: Meditations onFamily, Food and Culture, Loving Pedro Infante, Face of An Angel, and a short story collection, The Last of the Menu Girls and a children’s book, La Mujer Que Sabía El Idioma de Los Animales/The Woman Who Knew the Language of the Animals. Chávez has performed her one-woman shows, Novena Narrativas: The Novena Narratives and El Muro/The Wall: A Chorus of Immigrant Women's Voices throughout the U.S.