by Dallas Woodburn, Fiction Editor

Congrats to issue 24.1 contributor Claire Vaye Watkins on the publication of her first collection of stories, Battleborn.

Antonya Nelson, previous judge for our Wabash Prize for Fiction, wrote a terrific review of Battleborn for the New York Times in which she concludes, “Readers will share in the environs of the author and her characters, be taken into the hardship of a pitiless place and emerge on the other side — wiser, warier and weathered like the landscape.”

A Kirkus review raved: “Gloriously vivid stories about the human heart.” Publisher’s Weekly echoed: “Watkins writes with precision and care, the sentences themselves as surprising as the events, the dialogue, and the spare description. … There is a purity to the prose that is a constant pleasure to read.”

And, to cap it all off, Claire Vaye Watkins was also recently recognized by the National Book Foundation as one of this year’s “5 Under 35″ authors! What a huge honor!

Watkins was born in Death Valley in 1984 and raised in the Nevada desert. In addition to Sycamore Review, her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, One Story, Ploughshares, Glimmertrain, Best of the West: New Stories From the Wide Side of the Missouri and elsewhere.  She has received a Father William Ralston Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a Presidential Fellowship from the Ohio State University, where she received her MFA. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, Claire is an assistant professor of creative writing at Bucknell University.

We are thrilled that her story “Wish You Were Here” appears in issue 24.1 of Sycamore Review. You can read an excerpt here.