From: "Megdell, Anna" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Monday, March 4, 2019 at 8:29 AM
To: David Ratledge <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: UT Creative Writing Series Presents Claire Vaye Watkins

Knoxville, TN: On Monday, March 11, writer Claire Vaye Watkins will read as part of the University of Tennessee Creative Writing Series.

Claire Vaye Watkins was born in Bishop, California in 1984. She was raised in the Mojave Desert, in Tecopa, California and 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. She is the author of the novel 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.

Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, Tin House, Freeman’s, The Paris Review, Story Quarterly, New American Stories, Best of the West, The New Republic, The New York Times, Pushcart Prize XLIII and many others. A Guggenheim Fellow, one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” and Granta‘s “Best Young American Novelists,” Claire is the director and co-founder, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a festival of art and literature in the Mojave Desert.

The reading begins at 7 p.m. in Strong Hall, Room 101 on the University of Tennessee Campus. The event is free and open to the public; all are encouraged to attend. 

The mission of the UT Creative Writing Series is to feature “writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction from around the country and around the world.” The series is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Department of English.