Claire Jimenez

Claire Jimenez is an American author of Puerto Rican descent. She is the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories (2019) and the novel What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (2023), a darkly comic debut novel about a Puerto Rican family in Staten Island searching for their missing sister, who disappeared fifteen years earlier and who may now be appearing on a reality TV show. The novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2024 and was praised for its warmth, its sharp family dynamics, and its portrait of working-class Puerto Rican life in New York. Jimenez grew up in Staten Island and received her MFA from the University of Notre Dame. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and other organisations and has been recognised as an important emerging voice in Latinx fiction. Her work blends realism with wry comedy and brings sustained attention to communities rarely centred in American literary fiction. Jimenez teaches creative writing and lives in the United States.