“Claire’s always been a fascinating thinker and writer . . . she plumbs the depths and tests the limits of what it means to be a sentient being on this wild planet. Her characters make connections across time and space in way that makes us ask ourselves, from our seats in the audience, where we place ourselves on the cosmic scale.”
“Her dialogue is truthful, her characters fully human, and the questions she has them wrestle with provoke the kind of debate about personal history, family, faith and belief that is the substance of our strongest theatre and playwriting.”
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 (for which she wrote five plays and two librettos), and spent six years as a company member of the award-winning Portland-based writers' collective Playwrights West.
Her current project is How Can I Keep From Singing?, a play about the intersection of Catholicism and queerness, which will receive its first workshop in October 2022 at University of Portland, as the theatre department's first-ever commissioned original play. Her most recent project, The Broken Heart Spread - a one-woman play about a day in the life of a tarot reader, with seven scenes inspired by different tarot cards - was commissioned by The Theatre Company (Portland, OR) in 2020, and produced as a streaming film in 2021, starring DeLanna Studi and directed by Brandon Woolley.
Her play Dear Galileo was produced in Portland in 2015 by Playwrights West and CoHo Productions, where it was a Drammy Award finalist for Best Original Script, and has been developed at The Sheen Center for Thought & Culture and the the Lark Play Development Center (New York, NY), Pasadena Playhouse (Pasadena, CA), Enroot Theatre Company (Seattle, WA) and Artists Repertory Theatre (Portland, OR).
Her other plays include Writer’s Block and Red Sky At Morning, produced by Southwest Stageworks at Wilson High School in partnership with Playwrights West; The Demons Down Under the Sea, a queer retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” produced in 2014 by Shaking-the-Tree in partnership with Playwrights West as part of a collection of world premiere Poe adaptations; the Scottish folk musical Carter Hall (with Nashville songwriter Sarah Hart); and the chamber opera The Witch of the Iron Wood (with Portland classical composer Evan Lewis), among others.
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. Its sequel, All Things Fall, is scheduled to be released in September of 2022, followed by the third and final installment in the trilogy, Zero Hour, in early 2023.
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 worked for over 15 years as a nonprofit grantwriter and fundraising consultant.
In her free time, she plays Dungeons & Dragons 1-3 times a week, buys way too many books, and yells about politics, feminism and science fiction on the internet, where her pop culture criticism has appeared in Vice Magazine and on StarTrek.com, as well as podcasts such as Thank You, Five! (a musical theatre podcast), Fuckbois of Literature (a podcast about terrible people from great books), Fathoms Deep (a Black Sails podcast), and The Afictionados (a Lost podcast). She is most famous on Twitter for a 100-tweet thread about how Joey and Rachel should have ended up together on Friends which briefly blew up the internet in 2017 and greatly displeased Jennifer Aniston.