The Indiana University East School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) will present the Regional Writers Series: An Evening with Claire Vaye Watkins, at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 16, in the Nasser Paydar Classroom, located in the Student Events Center.

Claire Vaye Watkins
Photo by Heike Steinweg

The event is free and open to the public.

The HSS Regional Writers Series brings both established and emerging writers of significance to campus for workshops and public readings.

While on campus, Watkins will teach a class for IU East at 3:30 p.m. in Whitewater Hall Room 212. The class is open to all IU East students.

Watkins is a writer of national reputation, whose fiction takes up issues of contemporary relevance including climate change and social inequities.

A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, Claire earned her M.F.A. from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, Tin House, Freeman’s, The Paris Review, Story Quaterly, New American Stories, Best of the West, The New Republic, The New York Times, and many others.

She is the author of Gold Fame Citrus and 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.

A Guggenheim Fellow, Watkins has been a professor at Bucknell University and Princeton, and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. She is also the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.