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Claire O'Connor

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Claire O'Connor
Professor


T.J. Day Hall 313

coconnor@linfield.edu

Claire O’Connor is a writer and educator who has worked with students of many ages in New York, California, Idaho, Morocco, Malaysia, Greece, South Africa, and Scotland. She was a 2022 Best of the Net Finalist in Fiction, she was longlisted for the 2022 Discoveries Prize sponsored by the Women's Prize, and she has previously won The Missouri Review’s Miller Audio Prize for prose. 

Education

  • BA, English, Yale University
  • MFA, creative writing, University of Idaho
  • MS Ed., teaching adolescents with disabilities, Long Island University
  • Ph.D., creative writing, University of Edinburgh

Academic interests

Literary fiction: short fiction and novels, environmental writing, ecocriticism

Publications

  • "Night Swimming with Godzilla" in New Writing Scotland 40, August 2022
  • "How to Have the Perfect Picnic" in Open Book Unbound June 2022
  • "The Epic of Beowulf According to Wealhtheow" in Hillfire Anthology, Vol 1, May 2022
  • "Jaws" in Root of Evil, a Villainous Anthology, in Daily Drunk Mag, Oct 31, 2021
  • "Birth" in Litro, 22 Oct 2021
  • "When the Queen of Heaven Broke Open the Underworld and Unleashed the Dead" in Wigleaf, 1 Sept 2021, nominated for a Pushcart Prize
  • "Myths" in LEON Literary Review, Issue #9, 2021, nominated for a Pushcart Prize
  • "Home From the Wars" in the Baltimore Review, Spring 2021, finalist for Best of the Net in Fiction 2022
  • The Roof of the World (Part 1)" winner of the Missouri Review Miller Audio Prize 2018
  • "Foreign Bodies" in Shenandoah, Spring 2016
  • "Age of the Fifth Sun" in the Southern Indiana Review, Fall/Winter 2015
  • "One in Wins" in Gravel, May 2015
  • "The Second Door" in Fiction Circus
  • "Cape Town" in the Best New American Voices 2010

Presentations, performances and papers

  • O’Connor, Claire. “War and Enchantment in Anthony Marra's The Tsar of Love and Techno.” Conference on War and nature: traces, interactions and reconfigurations in 19th- to 21st-century literature in English. Paul-Valery University, Montpellier, France, 7-8 Oct, 2021. 
  • O’Connor, Claire, librettist. “The Land of Nightingales and Honey,” composed by Hayley Jenkins. An opera duet about a refugee experience performed by members of the Mahogany Opera Group at Reid Hall, Edinburgh, 21 Feb, 2020.
  • O’Connor, Claire. “Victoria Island, 1930.” Original story. Conference on Creative Writing: Processes, Theory, Influences at the University of Edinburgh, 25 June, 2019.