Claire Vaye Watkins Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Claire Vaye Watkins is a published American author and an academic.

She was born April 9, 1984 in Bishop, California. Claire grew up in the Mojave Desert in Tecopa, California and then Pahrump, Nevada.

She graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno. Claire then attended Ohio State University, earning her MFA and being given the status of Presidential Fellow.

She has written essays and stories that have been featured in many different places including One Story, Granta, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, New Stories from the Southwest 2013, Best of the West 2011, the New York Times, and more.

Claire has also gotten fellowships from the Writers’ Conferences at Sewanee and Bread Loaf. Her short story collection Battleborn was well received in 2012. It won the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Story Prize, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Battleborn was also a finalist to win the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award as well as the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. It was picked as a best book of 2012 by the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, Flavorwire, NPR.org, and Time Out New York. She has also been picked as one of the “5 Under 35” by the National Book Foundation.

Claire has been a visiting assistant professor at Princeton University and Bucknell University as well as at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She also serves as the co-director of the Mojave School with Derek Palacio. She has taught creative writing at the University of California, Irvine. This is a creative writing workshop conducted for free for teens in the rural Nevada area. She also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014.

Her debut fictional novel was released in 2015, Gold Fame Citrus. Her second book is title I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness. It was released in 2021.

She was married to Derek Palacio. The two share a daughter and separated in 2018 before ultimately divorcing. Her books Gold Fame Citrus and I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness are in development to be adapted into media.

Gold Fame Citrus is a 2015 novel by Claire Vaye Watkins. It is her second book. The book was received well and was deemed ‘enthralling’ by Slate, while Emily St. John called the fearlessness of the author ‘a great pleasure’ of the book. Read if you’re looking for something original to enjoy!

Luz is a poster child for the conservation movement of the southern California in the close future, which is parched from water. Then there’s Ray, a surfer after deserting the army. He’s squatting in the abandoned mansion of a starlet and trying to survive.

A lot of the “Mojavs” are stopped from crossing the borders freely to better regions by armed vigilantes. They’ve let themselves be moved to eastern encampments. Ray and Luz are holdouts, making do on water and cola. They also use whatever they can scavenge and loot, and improvise with it all.

The love between the couple is fragile. But somehow in this dry place it is able to bloom and it all seems to be enough. When they find a child and cross paths with them, the hope that they can pursue a future that is better overall begins.

This is an incredibly unique and original book that will have you turning the pages until you get to the end to find out what happens! Watkins’s book looks into the myths that we not only tell ourselves but that we begin to believe about others, as well as the power of relationships and a worrisome future that could be the one that we inhabit.

I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness is the second novel and third book by Claire Vaye Watkins. Released in 2021, the autofiction work was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

This is the story of love in an age where most things are collapsing. It is the story of one woman’s visiting to work, sex, marriage, family, and being a mother.

Ever since the main character’s baby was born, she has been able to just laugh and see why things are often humorous, or maybe not quite so much.

She has left behind her baby daughter and her husband to fly on an airplane to Reno for a speaking engagement. She doesn’t have much with her, just a breast pump and a cast of postpartum depression.

Her escape from having to do all of the things around the home gives her a chance to look up old friends and find herself again. However, this ends up turning into a getaway from the cage of marriage and being a mom, and a descent into the past that doesn’t appear to have a bottom.

She finds ghosts everywhere in the same Mojave Desert she grew up in. She hears from a first love who self-destructed and it haunted her. She meets a member of one of America’s most famous cults. She meets her mother, the woman with the native spark.

She is unable to go back in time to fix it, but what can she do to move forward? She’s doing everything that she can to find a home in this world. Funny and tender, this book shows Watkins as one of the more significant writers of our time. Check out this book and see what you think of it!