Professor, English
School of Humanities

Claire Vaye Watkins was born in Bishop, California in 1984 and raised in the Mojave Desert. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, Claire earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. She is the author of the novels Gold Fame Citrus, and I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness, as well as the short story collection Battleborn, which won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library’s 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. Claire's fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, The Paris Review, Tin House, Freeman’s, Story Quarterly, The New Republic, and many others. Among the anthologies that include her work are New American Stories, Best of the West, Best of the Southwest, Pushcart Prize XLIII, and The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story. A Guggenheim Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow, and named one of Granta's "Best Young American Novelists" in 2017, Claire lives in Orange County and the Mojave Desert.

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https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=6800

Last updated
03/04/2025