Claire Millikin grew up in Georgia, North Carolina, and overseas. She graduated from Yale with a degree in Philosophy, and later earned her doctorate in English literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has worked as a janitor, a waitress, and a copywriter, and now teaches as a lecturer in Art History at the University of Virginia. Before coming to Charlottesville, she lived for many years in rural coastal Maine. She is the author of five full-length books of poems including STATE FAIR ANIMALS (Unicorn Press, 2018), TELEVISION (Unicorn Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Maine Literary Award in Poetry, MOTELS WHERE WE LIVED (Unicorn Press, 2014), After Houses—Poetry for the Homeless, and Museum of Snow, as well as a chapbook of poems, The Gleaners.

Other poems by Claire Millikin in Verse Daily:
December 15, 2016:   "Ephebe" "My father once had a student whom he loved..."
August 6, 2015:   "Dusk Waitress" "At the end of childhood, I worked in a restaurant...."
February 4, 2014:   "The Foxes" "Step by step, door by door, she opened the house..."

Books by Claire Millikin:

Other poems on the web by Claire Millikin:
"Fox"
"Materiality in Poetry"

About State Fair Animals:

"Claire Millikin's lines condense paradoxical and painful experience into glittering musical constellations--an expressionist torrent, informed by a neoclassical taste for symmetry and keen closure. Defying all jurisdiction, her lyrics evade their own meticulous borders, and reach with astonishing poignance into a zone of pure, lancing attestation: the Cassandra-clarity of soulful witness."
—Wayne Koestenbaum