Professor, English
School of Humanities

Claire Vaye Watkins was born in Bishop, California and raised in the Mojave Desert. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, she earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. She is the author of the novels I Love You but I've Chosen Darknessand Gold Fame Citrus, and 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 Granta, The Paris Review, The Believer, either/or, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Tin House, Freeman’s, Story Quarterly, One Story, The Yale Review and many others. Her work is anthologized in New American Stories, Best of the West, Best of the Southwest, The Future is Feminist, Pushcart Prize XLIII, and The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story. A Guggenheim Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow, and one of Granta's "Best Young American Novelists," Claire lives in Orange County and the Mojave Desert. Her fourth book, a novel called Yellow Pine, is forthcoming in the summer of 2026.

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

Last updated
09/22/2025