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The University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers presents a reading by writer Claire Vaye Watkins on Thursday, December 3 at 8pm in Memorial Hall.

Born in 1984 in Nevada, Claire Vaye Watkins was a Presidential Fellow at the Ohio State University where she received her MFA, and now teaches at the University of Michigan. She has been published in The Paris Review, Granta, One Story, Ploughshares, the Hopkins Review, The Las Vegas Weekly, The Sycamore Review and Glimmer Train; her story "Man-O-War" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize 2011. She received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2014. 

With Derek Palacio she founded and directs The Mojave School, a free creative writing camp for rural Nevada teens. 

Watkins's first book, a story collection, Battleborn, was published by Riverhead in August 2012; foreign rights have been sold in France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan, Taiwan and the UK. Her speculative disaster novel, Gold Fame Citrus, was published by Riverhead in 2015. NPR said of the novel, "Watkins' vision — not just of a world broken by ecological disaster, but of the sorts of people who would thrive in that world — is mercilessly sharp. She's got a knife eye for details, a vicious talent for cutting to the throbbing vein of animal strangeness that scratches inside all of us."