Claire Vaye Watkins

Born on April 9, 1984, in Bishop, California, Claire Vaye Watkins grew up in the Mojave Desert, first in Tecopa, a small town on the edge of Death Valley, and then across the state line in Pahrump, Nevada. Her mother, Martha, ran a rock shop and museum. Her father, Paul Watkins, had been part of Charles Manson's Family and testified against Manson in 1970; he died of leukemia in 1990, when she was six. She left Pahrump for the University of Nevada, Reno, and went on to an MFA at Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. Her first book, Battleborn (2012), ten stories of the desert West, opens with Ghosts, Cowboys, in which a narrator much like Watkins tells her father's story beside the history of the ranch where the Family once lived. The collection won The Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Book Foundation named her one of its 5 Under 35. A Guggenheim Fellowship followed in 2014. Her first novel, Gold Fame Citrus (2015), imagines a California so long without rain that the Amargosa Dune Sea is swallowing the Southwest, and follows a former model, Luz Dunn, her boyfriend Ray and a neglected toddler they take in. In On Pandering, an essay published in Tin House, she asked whether she had written Battleborn to please the literary establishment. I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness (2021), whose narrator carries her own name and flees a husband and infant daughter for Nevada in the grip of postpartum depression, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She has taught at Princeton, Bucknell and the University of Michigan, and now teaches at the University of California, Irvine and the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her third novel, Yellow Pine (2026), returns to the South Pahrump Valley.

With the writer Derek Palacio, then her fiance, Watkins went home to Pahrump to run the Mojave School, a free writing workshop for teenagers who had never taken one. Asked whether they wanted to go to college, every student said yes; asked where, their certainty crumbled, and one girl said she knew the name of no college except Princeton.