Claire Jimenez

Claire Jimenez is a Puerto Rican writer who grew up in Brooklyn and Staten Island New York, she is the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) and What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Grand Central, 2023), which was favorably reviewed by the Associated Press and USA Today, and won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the award included a $15,000 cash prize. She was also named a finalist for the International Latino Book Awards and won Best Latino Book of 2019 by NBC News.

She co-founded the Puerto Rican Literature Project in 2019. In 2019 her book Staten Island Storieswon the Hornblower Award for a first book from the New York Society Library. She has an MFA from Vanderbilt University and in 2022 Jimenez earned a Ph.D. in English with a concentration in ethnic studies and digital humanities from University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Jimenez is an assistant professor and McCausland Faculty Fellow at University of South Carolina.

Her essays have appeared in Afro-Hispanic Review and The Rumpus.