On Monday, Oct. 21, award-winning fiction writer Claire Vaye Watkins read an abridged version of her short story, Wish You Were Here at The Moose Exchange in downtown Bloomsburg as a part of the Big Dog Reading Series. The story was one of ten in Watkins’ collection entitled Battleborn.
The San Francisco Chronicle called Battleborn “A real treat. . . Through remarkably assured writing. . . Watkins chronicles despair and loneliness, catalogs valiant fights for survival and desparate pleas to be heard, and every time has us rooting for her underdogs.”
Watkins was born in Death Valley and raised in the Nevada Desert. Battleborn was published by Penguin Group in 2012. Since then it has won The Story Prize, The American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, and The New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. Watkins was also named a National Book Foundation “5 under 35” Fiction Writer. Currently Watkins is an assistant professor at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
The Big Dog Reading Series is sponsored by Bloomsburg University’s Center for the Visual and Performing Arts and the English department. Other readings include a faculty reading in February, memoirist and poet Nick Flynn in March, and a student reading in April. The series is free and open to the public.
