Room 220 Presents: A Happy Hour Salon with the Official 2016 Tennessee Williams Festival Fiction Contest Winner and Contest Judge Claire Vaye Watkins

Room 220 is delighted to host a Happy Hour Salon honoring the winner of the 2016 Tennessee Williams Literary Festival’s fiction contest from at 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 31, at the Antenna Gallery (3718 St. Claude Ave.).

This official Tennessee Williams Festival event will begin with a book launch for the inaugural winner of the UNO Press Laboratory Award, Each Vagabond by Name by Margo Orlando Littell. The evening will conclude with feature readings by the 2016 fiction contest winner and this year’s fiction judge, Claire Vaye Watkins. 

Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of Gold Fame Citrus and Battleborn, which won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, Tin House, The Paris Review, One Story, Glimmer Train, Best of the West, Best of the Southwest, The New York Times and many others. A Guggenheim Fellow, Claire is on the faculty of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She is also the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.