Claire Vaye Watkins

Claire Vaye Watkins was born in Bishop, California in 1984. She was raised in the Mojave Desert, first in Tecopa, California and then across the state line in Pahrump, Nevada. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, Claire earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Best of the West 2011, New Stories from the Southwest 2013, the New York Times and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers Conferences, Claire was also one of the National Book Foundations 5 Under 35. 


Her collection of short stories, Battleborn, won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Librarys Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.

Her novel, Gold Fame Citrus, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in Fall 2015.

A Guggenheim Fellow, Claire is on the faculty of the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. She is also the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.