BOOK CLUB 101
NYU Skirball’s Book Club is back! We pair each production in our season with a complementary book – novels, short stories, essays, poetry, memoirs. Whether or not you have a chance to see the show, you can pick up the book and join us via Zoom for an informal discussion. We’ll meet on Wednesday nights at 7PM, opening week of each show.
How does it work? RSVP with your e-mail address so we can send you the Zoom link on the day of the event. After a brief introduction, we will shift participants into self-led breakout rooms, in groups of about 10, so everyone can participate in a discussion before coming back to the main room to wrap up. Need a copy of the book? Order a copy from our bookshop.org list, and NYU Skirball will receive a portion of the proceeds.
ABOUT THE BOOK
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kali Fajardo-Anstine is from Denver, Colorado. The author of Sabrina & Corina, a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Bingham Prize, The Clark Prize, The Story Prize, the Saroyan International Prize, and winner of an American Book Award, she is the 2021 recipient of the Addison M. 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, O: the Oprah Magazine, 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 2022/23 Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Texas State University. Her debut novel, Woman of Light, will be published in June, 2022. www.kalifajardoanstine.com
WHY THIS BOOK?
Themes of heritage, music, and ritual infuse the text, as Fajardo-Anstine (like Poveda) grapples with the weight of tradition.