Katherine Vaz (born August 26, 1955) is an American author who has published two novels, two story collections, and children’s stories. A former Briggs-Copeland Fellow in Fiction at Harvard University and a 2006-7 Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, she lives and works in New York City.
Vaz grew up in the East Bay area of San Francisco and attended Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland. She earned a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1977 after spending her senior year at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. She earned a living as a freelance writer in Los Angeles, and after starting to publish fiction in various literary magazines, she was accepted into the graduate writing program at the University of California at Irvine in 1988.
Her studies centered upon magical realism, and she designed a graduate course on the subject when she was an Associate Professor of English at the University of California at Davis. The authors studied included Clarice Lispector, Alejo Carpentier, Mercè Rodoreda, Julio Cortazar, Bruno Schulz, Rachel Ingalls, Yasunari Kawabata, Miguel Angel Asturias, José Saramago, and Gabriel García Márquez. She taught an abbreviated form of this course at the New School in New York as well as a summer course on Portuguese literature in Translation at Rutgers University in Newark.
She taught beginning and advanced fiction-writing at Harvard University for five years and has presented seminars at the Squaw Valley Writers Conference in California and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Career in Publishing
Her graduate thesis turned into her first book, Saudade, published by Bob Wyatt at St. Martin’s Press in 1994 and noted as the first novel from a major New York publisher about the Portuguese in America; her father’s family were immigrants to California from the Azores, and this forms much of the wellspring of her fiction.
The novel was selected for Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers series, and actress Marlee Matlin bought the film option. The book features a deaf young woman from the Azores who thinks in a language of color. A paperback edition was released in 1996, and a Portuguese translation appeared in 1999.
Her second novel, Mariana, was published in seven editions in six languages...two editions in English, a British and an American version, as well as Spanish, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, and German. Based upon the true story of the seventeenth-century Portuguese nun, Mariana Alcoforado, the story centers upon her love affair in the convent with a French soldier to whom she wrote five love letters that have been referred to as some of the most passionate documents in existence. Her existence is controversial; many scholars believe the letters were the invention of a French author. Vaz’s book is the first to offer a version of her possible life told as a novel in English. A romantic icon in Europe, Sister Mariana was written about by such authors as Stendahl and Rilke; her image was a subject for Matisse, Modigliani, and Braques.
Vaz traveled extensively in Portugal and consulted numerous archives in Portuguese in large part thanks to one of the convent-museum’s curators, Leonel Borrela. The novel was long on the bestsellers list in Portugal and went into many editions, including a mass-market pocket book.
The novel was also selected as one of the top three books to be promoted in 1998 by Rizzoli in Italy, and the German publisher, Hoffmann und Campe in Hamburg, released a successful hardback and paperback. The United States Library of Congress selected MARIANA as one of the Top Thirty International Books of 1998, and the American paperback edition was published by Aliform Publishing, Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2004. Anne Harrison, former Director of Development for Martin Scorsese, bought the film rights.
Vaz’s first story collection, Fado & Other Stories, featured a look at Azoreans and Azorean-Americans and won the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her second collection, Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese-American Stories, won the 2007 Prairie Schooner Prize in Fiction.
Her non-fiction includes book reviews for the Boston Globe and a chapter in a book of essays, Signatures of Grace, (Dutton, 2000) on the sacraments.
Vaz was a fiction editor for the Harvard Review from 2005-6 and has published children’s stories in anthologies by Simon & Schuster and Viking.
PEN/America, Authors Guild, Luso-American Education Foundation, PALCUS (Portuguese-American Leadership Conference of the U.S.), the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and the International Society for the Study of the Short Story in English.
October, 1996: “Magic and Obsession in Portuguese Literature,” PALCUS Conference, (Portuguese-American Leadership Conference/U.S.), UMass/Dartmouth.
March 7, 1997: “Saudade,” at the Luso-American Education Foundation Conference, University of California at Berkeley.
April 4, 1997: part of Luso-American contingent invited by Vice President Al Gore to welcome Prime Minister Antonio Guterrez of Portugal to the U.S.
May 2-4, 1997: “Azorean Stories: Reading History’s Silent Passages,” at Sixth Annual Symposium on Atlantic Heritages, Tulare, California.
October 20, 1997: “The Real and Imaginary Coalesce into Fiction: Songs of Fate in Portuguese Stories,” at the Library of Congress at the invitation of the Hispanic Division of the Library and the Portuguese Embassy.
October 20, 1997: interview taped for the Luso-Hispanic archives. First Portuguese-American to be honored with a recording. Past participants include Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gabriela Mistral, Jorge Amado, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda.
October 21, 1997: “Magic, Spirits, and Silence in Luso-American Fiction,” Georgetown University.
April 2, 1998: Speaker for Rutgers/Phi Beta Kappa at First International Conference on the Literature of Portugal.First speaker for Daniel A. & Elvira Rodrigues Lecture Series, Rutgers University.
June 12-13, 1998: member of six-person U.S. Presidential Delegation sent to Expo 98/World’s Fair, Lisbon.
July, 2002: International Conference on the Short Story, New Orleans. October, 2003: Guest speaker, Yale University, Council on Latin American Studies.
April, 2004: Ran a Colloquium on Transnational Fiction at Princeton University.
March 2004: Associated Writing Programs Convention, Chicago: Panel on “Structuring Your Story Collection.” NPR radio segment on Mariana. Guest writer/University of Illinois at Urbana.
October, 2004: International Conference on the Short Story, Madrid, Spain. (American, Spanish,Portuguese authors).
June, 2006: International Conference on the Short Story, Lisbon, Portugal. (Gave Welcoming Address at American Embassy + reading).
March, 2007: The Library of Congress/Hispanic Division: Below the Salt: A Novel in Progress.
April, 2007: Below the Salt: A Novel in Progress: Presentation at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
September 22, 2007: Escrita da Vida: Luso-American Fiction, a reading and conversation at the J.F.K. Library in Boston.
April 15-17, 2008: Notre Dame University, guest writer and reader with Alice McDermott
"Our Lady of the Artichokes" (Pleiades, Fall 2003)
"The Love Life of an Assistant Animator" (Glimmer Train, Fall 2003)
"A Simple Affair" (Gargoyle Magazine, May 2004)
"The Knife Longs for the Ruby" (Ninth Letter, Spring 2004)
"Our Bones Here Are Waiting for Yours" (Five Points, 2004)
"East Bay Grease" (The Antioch Review, Summer 2004)
"One Must Speak of Sex in French" (Confrontation, Fall 2004/Winter 2005)
"All Riptides Roar with Sand from Opposing Shores" (Notre Dame Review, Winter 2006)
"Lisbon Story" (Harvard Review, Spring 2006)
Non-fiction
“Songs of the Soul, Songs of the Night,” The New York Times, Sophisticated Traveler Magazine, September 18, 1994
Signatures of Grace (Dutton, 2000). Essay on Baptism. (In conjunction with Mary Gordon, Andre Dubus, Patricia Hampl, Ron Hansen, Paula Huston, Paul Mariani).
“Carving the Fruitstones,” for anthology about short fiction, 2004, Greenwood Publications.
“This Howling,” essay on the Azores/introduction to novel by João de Melo (My World Is Not of This Kingdom, translated from Portuguese by Gregory Rabassa), Aliform Press, 2003.
Children's literature
“The Kingdom of Melting Glances” short story in A Wolf at the Door (Simon & Schuster, 2000, in fourth printing)
“A World Painted by Birds” in Green Man anthology (Viking, 2002)
“My Swan Sister,” title story in Swan Sister and Other Stories (Simon & Schuster, 2003)
