Alumna Claire Jiménez, who earned a Ph.D. in 2022 in English with a concentration in ethnic studies and digital humanities, was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez, her debut novel and second book. The award honors the best published works of fiction by American residents, chosen annually by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation's Board of Directors to avoid commercial influence.
Now an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, she was previously part of a national team that received a $1.35 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to archive Puerto Rican literature.
She is also the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories (Johns Hopkins Press, December 2019), which received the 2019 Hornblower Award for a first book from the New York Society Library. Her fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in Remezcla, Afro-Hispanic Review, PANK, The Rumpus, el roommate, Eater, District Lit, The Toast and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications.
Jiménez earned her M.F.A. from Vanderbilt University and was a research fellow at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College and an assistant fiction editor at Prairie Schooner. She received the Institute for Ethnic Studies program's inaugural Rafael "Ralph" Grajeda Award.
