Bio
Claire Boyles (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and the Environment, a writer, and a former farmer. A 2022 Whiting Award winner in fiction, she is the author of Appraisals and Site Fidelity, which won the 2022 High Plains Book Award for Short Stories. Site Fidelity 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 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.
Courses
- Special Topics: Narratives of Home and Land
- Special Topics: Contemporary Agrarian Literature
- Professional Development for Nature Writers
- Fiction Workshop: Nontraditional Narrators
- Seminar: Wilderness and Controversy
Research areas of interest
- Climate Fiction
- Literature of the American West
- Agrarian Narratives, Female Farmer Narratives
- Creative Nonfiction: Researched Memoir and Environmental Journalism
- Invertebrates and Community Science
- Interdisciplinary Studies and Engaged Humanities
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Books
“Appraisals.” New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2026.
“Site Fidelity.” New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2021
Recent prose publications
“Fiction As Filter: Writing the West’s Water Crisis.” Literary Hub, August 2026
“Almost A Home.” Crested Butte Magazine, Summer 2026
“Dragonflies of Southeastern Oklahoma,” Sierra Magazine, Summer 2024
“In Search of the Tarantula Mate-gration,” Sierra Magazine, Fall 2023
“Chickens” anthologized in What’s Next: Short Fiction in a Time of Change, Green Writers Press, 2023
“Wayfinding,” Sierra Magazine, Winter 2022
“Making Our Own Weather,” Aster(ix) Journal, Summer 2022: Nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays.
“Alto Cumulus Standing Lenticulars,” Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 2021
“9 Novels About Women Fighting for a Just Society,” Electric Literature, 2021
“Lost Gun, $1000 Reward, No Questions,” Boulevard, Fall 2019
“Riding Ditch,” Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 2019
“Failing at Important Things: A Parallel History,” Vela Magazine, May 2017
“Chickens, 2019,” The Kenyon Review, March/April 2018
“Ledgers,” The Masters Review, September 2016
Produced film projects
Writer, Story and Teleplay, “A Maple Valley Christmas,” Hallmark Movies and Mysteries, 2022. Adapted from “A Maple Valley Christmas” by Jerry Todt.
Writer, Story and Teleplay, “Sister Swap: A Hometown Holiday,” Hallmark Channel, 2021
Writer, Story and Teleplay, “Sister Swap: Christmas in the City,” Hallmark Channel, 2021
Recent honors & awards
- 2022 Whiting Award Winner in Fiction
- 2022 High Plains International Book Award Winner for Short Stories
- 2023 Alma Writer-in-Residence, Prairie Seas Project
- 2023 Mountain Words Writer-in-Residence, Crested Butte Center for the Arts
- Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collections
- Finalist for the Colorado Book Prize in Literary Fiction
- Shortlisted for the Best of the West Prize in Debut Fiction
- Finalist for the WILLA Award in Multi-form Fiction
- One of The Colorado Sun’s Best Books of 2021
- One of Outside Magazine’s Twenty Essential Works of Climate Fiction