Watkins to give reading as Virginia Butts Sturm Writer-in-Residence

Author Claire Vaye Watkins will give a reading as the 2018 Virginia Butts Sturm Writer-in-Residence at West Virginia University. She will read on Monday, Oct. 8 at 7:30 p.m. in the Milano Reading Room of the WVU Downtown Library. In addition to her reading, which is free and open to the public, she will work with WVU creative writing students for the week. 

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, Watkins earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. She is the author of the novel "Gold Frame Circus" 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,” Watkins is the director and co-founder, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a festival of art and literature in the Mojave Desert.

For more information, contact Glenn Taylor, director of creative writing, at maurice.taylor@mail.wvu.edu.