Please join me in welcoming Claire Boyles to the BookBrowse Community Forum.
Claire’s latest novel, Appraisals, was published earlier this month, and was a BookBrowse First Impressions selection earlier this year.
Claire is a writer, mom, and former farmer who lives and writes in Colorado. A 2022 Whiting Award winner in fiction, her first book, Site Fidelity, won the 2022 High Plains Book Award for Short Stories, and was featured in the August 4, 2021 issue of the BookBrowse Review. It was also longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and the Reading the West Award and was a finalist for both the Colorado Book Award and the WILLA Literary Award in Multiform Fiction. Her writing has appeared in VQR, Kenyon Review, Boulevard, and Masters Review, among others. She was a Peter Taylor Fellow for the Kenyon Review Writing Workshops and has received support from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Foundation, the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers Workshop, the Crested Butte Center for the Arts, and the Prairie Seas Project. She splits time between Loveland, Colorado and Ames, Iowa, where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and the Environment.
She is fascinated by the sex lives of Oklahoma Brown tarantulas and the ecologies of shortgrass prairies, leads a food and farming community book club for a farmland preservation nonprofit, and is a long-distance trail runner despite her fears of rattlesnakes and mountain lions. She is also a screenwriter with multiple credits on Hallmark Christmas movies.
Claire is joining us from Ames for a few days.
Welcome, Claire, and congratulations on the publication of Appraisals. Before we jump into our Q&A, is there anything you’d like to share with our members about yourself?