Claire Vaye Watkins was born in Bishop, California in 1984 and raised in the Mojave Desert, in Tecopa, California, and Pahrump, Nevada. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno and the Ohio State University, Claire is the author of three books: two novels (Gold, Fame, Citrus, and I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness), and the short story collection Battleborn. She has been awarded the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, theNewYorker.com, The Believer, on Granta‘s list of “Best Young American Novelists,” and elsewhere. She is a professor at UC Irvine, lives in Twentynine Palms, and can often be found at Camp Yellow Pine in the South Pahrump Valley, where she engages in direct action against for-profit industrial solar on public wilderness and for free, distributed community solar in the built environment alongside local conservation groups Basin and Range Watch and Mojave Green. [F/NF]