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Katherine Vaz: In Conversation

Listening to Portuguese women, all March long

Katherine Vaz wears her Portuguese roots on her sleeve.

She is the first Portuguese American to have her work recorded by the Library of Congress and has been a Briggs-Copeland Fellow in Fiction at Harvard University - one of Harvard’s most prestigious fellowships for authors - as well as a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

An acclaimed storyteller, Katherine Vaz has built a body of work recognized nationally and internationally. Her novel Mariana was published in six languages and selected by the Library of Congress as one of the Top Thirty International Books of 1998, and is currently in film development with Harrison Productions. Her debut novel, Saudade, was chosen as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and her most recent novel, Above the Salt, was published in 2023 by Flatiron Books/Macmillan. Her story collection Fado & Other Stories received the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and Our Lady of the Artichokes won a Prairie Schooner Award. Her work also includes The Love Life of an Assistant Animator & Other Stories and The Heart Is a Drowning Object, a multimedia collaboration with artist Isabel Pavão.

In addition to her fiction, her children’s stories have appeared in anthologies published by Viking, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster, and she won a national screenplay contest from the New York Film Academy and Writer’s Store based on one of her stories.

Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, recognition as a Portuguese American Woman of the Year, an appointment to the six-person Presidential Delegation to Expo ’98 in Lisbon, and a 2022 citation by the Portuguese American Leadership Council of the U.S. as one of the most influential women of Lusa heritage.

Recently, she was featured on Primeira Pessoa, the primetime television program highlighting notable careers, with interviewer Fátima Campos Ferreira. Vaz is the first American selected for the show.

Read her full interview below:

What professional achievement are you most proud of, or a moment where you felt you advanced opportunities for women in your field?
The great pride of my professional life has been to break into mainstream "big-five" publishing in America with stories and novels based largely on the Portuguese in America. For decades now, my novels and story collections have opened, I hope, the door to other Luso Americans in literature and the arts. It was my dream as a child to create books expressing lives that were not yet on the national scene. In terms of specific moments of pride, with my most recent novel, ABOVE THE SALT (A LINHA DO SAL in Portuguese), I became the first American featured on the primetime hit show PRIMEIRA PESSOA with Fátima Campos Ferreira, and the novel was a Book of the Week in People Magazine, which felt like permission to exhale! More personally, I am gratified by the number of young women through the years, in the Azores, mainland Portugal, and the USA, who have written or spoken to me to say thanks for showing how much is possible.
What is one piece of advice you would give to women at your career stage?
I am at a latter career stage, and to women middle-aged and older, I would say: Stay vital, stay creative. To younger people, I would say, Do not wait. Never wait! Make mistakes. As the poet Rilke recommended: Do the difficult things FIRST, not after you've "cleared the deck." Don't just do things; become someone. In other words, I decided not just to write; I decided to be a writer, that my work would never be separate from my heart, spirit, and mind.
Is there a book, tool, or resource that has helped you and that you’d recommend other women explore this month?
In terms of what resources to consult: If you're a writer, read a lot. Do not compare yourself to others. We're in an age of wanting things instantly, a time of comparing ourselves, a time of wanting to be "liked" all the time. Be happy for the success of friends: honestly, this will change not just your mindset but your life from one of fear to one of openness. To any young woman in any field: Simply step into it without delay, and like all of us, you'll fumble around but you'll be who you're meant to be. A thing to learn in the midst of striving in a career is who to become as a human in a world of others. Then one thing leads to another. I ended up teaching at Harvard not because I sought that out but because my writing allowed me to fumble forward until the world showed that it would give me gifts and ideas beyond my own plans.