Claire Vaye Watkins

Claire Vaye Watkins is an American author, born in 1984 in Bishop, California. Her debut story collection, Battleborn (2012), won the Story Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize and earned her a spot on the National Book Foundation's '5 Under 35' list. Her debut novel, Gold Fame Citrus (2015), imagines a California drained by permanent drought and follows a young woman drawn into a cult built around a mystic desert prophet. She has continued with the autofictional I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness (2021) and, most recently, Yellow Pine (2026), a return to the Mojave Desert landscape. A Guggenheim Fellow who teaches at UC Irvine, Watkins is known for rendering Western landscape—drought, desert, and abandoned land—with unusual physical intensity.