About Claire
Portland native Claire Willett is a playwright, novelist, former Catholic youth minister, and nonprofit grantwriter. She is a past recipient of the Oregon Literary Fellowship for Drama, has received creative project grants from the Regional Arts & Culture Council and the Oregon Arts Commission, was a founding artist of Portland's Fertile Ground Festival of New Work, and spent six years as a company member of the award-winning Portland-based writers' collective Playwrights West. Her plays include How Can I Keep From Singing?, an exploration of the intersection between Catholicism and queerness, commissioned in 2022 by University of Portland; The Broken Heart Spread, a one-woman play about a day in the life of a tarot reader, which was commissioned by The Theatre Company (Portland, OR) in 2020, and produced as a streaming film in 2021; Dear Galileo, which has been workshopped across the country and was produced in Portland in 2015 by Playwrights West and CoHo Productions, where it was a Drammy Award finalist for Best Original Script; and many more. Her first novel, The Rewind Files, a time travel adventure about Watergate, was released in September 2015 by Retrofit (now Axiomatic Publishing) in Los Angeles, with two sequels - All Things Fall and Zero Hour - to be released in 2024 and 2025.
She has a B.A. in Theatre from Whitman College (Walla Walla, WA), is a graduate of the Paul A. Kaplan Theatre Management Program at Manhattan Theatre Club (New York, NY), and resides in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, where she has 20 years of experience in communications, grantwriting, public relations, social media strategy and content creation for nonprofits all over the Pacific Northwest, such as: Age & Gender Equity In the Arts, The ALS Association of Oregon & SW Washington, Artists Repertory Theatre, Benton County Natural Areas, Parks & Events (Corvallis, OR), Center for Diversity & the Environment, Curious Comedy Theatre, Echo Theatre Company, Fertile Ground New Work Festival, Free Geek, Fuse Theatre Ensemble, Global Health Promise, Hand2Mouth Theatre, Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center, Isinglass, Living Stages, MetroEast Community Media, Metropolitan Youth Symphony, Obo Addy Legacy Project, Oregon Ballet Theatre, Oregon Tilth, Outdoor School, Outward Bound, Polaris Dance Theatre, Portland Actors Conservatory, Portland Metro STEM Partnership, Portland Opera, Portland Revels, Public Playhouse, Portland Area Theatre Alliance, Route 11 Dance Festival (Lexington, VA), Staged!, STEM Beyond Schools, Tears of Joy Puppet Theatre, Theatre Vertigo, Third Rail Repertory Theatre, Walla Walla Symphony (Walla Walla, WA), Wind & Oar Boat School, and Wordstock.
If you're interested in learning more about Claire's creative work, visit the links below!