Claire McLane

Claire received her B.A. in Cultural Regional Studies with an emphasis on the U.S./Mexico border region from Prescott College for the Liberal Arts. She also completed an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Arizona. Prior to teaching in an academic setting, she worked with environmental non-profits, as well as organized local literary reading events and served as an editor for literary journals. Claire has led poetry workshops, and taught introductory composition and creative writing courses prior to teaching in the W.A. Franke Honors College. She is a poet and writer and has been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Minnie Torrence Award for Poetry, as well as a University of Arizona Foundation Award. Her poems have been published in The Columbia Review, and the Academy of American Poets. Claire's teaching and writing focus on contemporary American poetry, through an interdisciplinary lens, and she incorporates the incredible partnership between the Franke Honors College and the world-renowned University of Arizona Poetry Center into all of her courses. Creating safe, exploratory, and creatively expressive classroom environments is of utmost value to her. Claire’s scholarly interests include the intersections of creative writing, the natural environment, sense of place, and identity. Her current writing projects explore the complexities of motherhood, islands as literal and metaphorical places for investigations of identity, and the intersections of science (particularly Cellular Biology and Ecology) and creative expression. You can find Claire teaching courses on poetry, creative writing, the body and illness, and mythology of the desert.