Kali Fajardo-Anstine (born November 9, 1986) is an American novelist and short story writer from Denver, Colorado.

[1] She struggled with depression[2] growing up because she didn’t feel she fit in culturally or socially with her peers, and turned to books and writing for comfort.

[3] After being pushed to leave high school by an unsupportive English teacher, Fajardo-Anstine dropped out and earned her GED.

[3] In 2013, she earned a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from University of Wyoming,[1] where she studied under writers Brad Watson and Joy Williams.

On Latino USA in 2022, she said of her work, "I could never pick up a book, turn on the TV, listen to the radio, and find people like us allowed to talk about the nuance of their identity... Everything was always sort of neatly put into categories and those categories did not represent who we were.”[8] Fajardo-Anstine is inspired by the absence of Chicano or Latinx culture in the histories or narratives of the American West.

She found relics like an infant-size Ku Klux Klan robe with initials stitched in, yet she could not find information about indigenous and native Americans of Mexican descent.