Claire Jiménez Wins Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Claire Jiménez, assistant professor of English at the University of South Carolina, has won the 2024 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her novel, What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Grand Central Publishing, 2023). The award is widely considered to be one of the most prestigious awards in American fiction.

Dr. Jiménez has been a University of South Carolina faculty member since 2022. She currently holds a joint appointment in the department of English language and literature and the department of African American studies. Her research and teaching interests focus on creative writing, ethnic studies, digital humanities, African American literature, Latinx and Afro-Latinx literature, Puerto Rican and Caribbean studies, and African literature.

Prior to her current role with the University of South Carolina, Dr. Jiménez served as a research assistant with the African Poetry Digital Portal. She also co-founded The Puerto Rican Literature Project in partnership with the United States Latino Digital Humanities Program at the University of Houston. In addition to her most recent award-winning book, she is the author of Staten Island Stories (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).

Dr. Jiménez is a graduate of Colby College in Waterville, Maine, where she majored in English. She holds a master of fine arts degree from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.