Newsroom

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Author Claire Vaye Watkins will read at Oregon State University on Friday, May 22, beginning at 7:30 p.m. in the Valley Library rotunda (201 S.W. Waldo Place, Corvallis).

The event is free and open to the public. A question-and-answer session and book signing will follow the reading.

Watkins is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and an assistant professor at Bucknell University. She also is the co-director of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.

Watkins' stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Best of the West 2011, New Stories from the Southwest 2013, the New York Times and elsewhere. In 2012, she was selected as one of the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35."

Her collection of short stories, "Battleborn," won numerous awards, including the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The Rumpus called Watkins, "Exceptional... A writer of great precision and greater restraint, [she] is a natural storyteller whose material enriches that gift rather than engulfing it... One doesn't have to be from the Battleborn state to recognize and appreciate literature that resonates like this."

This event is part of the 2014-15 Visiting Writers Series sponsored by the MFA Program in Creative Writing in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film.