Claire Willett Books in Order

Claire Willett is a Portland writer whose work moves easily between stage and page. She grew up in Portland, Oregon, studied theatre at Whitman College, and later completed the Paul A. Kaplan Theatre Management Program at Manhattan Theatre Club in New York.

Before fiction readers found her, she had already built a varied working life. She has been a Catholic youth minister, a nonprofit grantwriter, and a fundraising consultant. Rather than arriving at writing from one narrow path, she came to it through theatre, community work, and the everyday business of helping arts groups keep going.

The theatre came first.

Willett spent years writing plays and librettos in Portland, and she was a founding artist of the Fertile Ground Festival of New Work. She also spent six years as a company member of Playwrights West. Along the way, she received an Oregon Literary Fellowship for Drama and project support from the Regional Arts & Culture Council and the Oregon Arts Commission. Her play Dear Galileo was produced in Portland in 2015 and became a finalist for a Drammy Award for Best Original Script.

A lot of her stage work points to the same interests that later shape her fiction. Dear Galileo wrestles with science, religion, and family across different time periods. The Demons Down Under the Sea reworks Edgar Allan Poe through a queer lens. Other projects, including Writer's Block, Carter Hall, The Broken Heart Spread, and How Can I Keep From Singing?, show how comfortable she is moving between comedy, history, music, faith, and identity.

She clearly likes stories where big ideas have to survive ordinary human mess.

Her first novel, The Rewind Files, was published in 2015. It begins in 2112, with junior Time Travel Bureau agent Regina Bellows discovering a conspiracy tied to Watergate and getting pushed into the field for the first time. What follows is part time-travel puzzle, part political thriller, and part historical adventure. Readers who enjoy smart speculative setups, high stakes, and a bit of sharp humor tend to find a lot to like there.

That book also gives a good sense of Willett's wider habits as a writer. She returns again and again to people who are smart, overmatched, and trying to do the right thing inside systems that are much bigger than they are. Science and faith, history and the present day, private loyalty and public duty, those tensions keep showing up. So do characters who have to think fast while the ground keeps shifting under them.

She doesn't stay in just one lane, either. Alongside her creative work, she has written journalism and commentary about politics, pop culture, and the arts. In 2025 she was named one of the Miller Foundation's Spark Award recipients, and she also began reporting on arts funding in Oregon, a beat that fits neatly with her long background in nonprofit development work.

She still lives in Portland, her hometown. She has continued her grantwriting and fundraising work for arts groups, and she has said that outside work she spends plenty of time playing Dungeons and Dragons, buying too many books, and talking about science fiction and culture online. It all feels of a piece. Her writing comes from someone who loves ideas, but also loves the people trying to live with them.