Claire Arbogast

The daughter of florists and granddaughter of a prolific gardener, award-winning author Claire Arbogast was born in 1950. She grew up among the winding streets and deep front porches of historic Irvington on the eastside of Indianapolis. But her life took a wide turn as books and the times challenged her limited perspective of the world. This questioning wove its way into her very fiber, leading her to try on different ways to live, different ways to love, and different ways to write with the hope of opening up attitudes with stories that start conversations.

After a few years of exploring (southern Indiana, Chicago, California, The Farm in Tennessee, Albuquerque, touring the country in a handmade camper, and a couple winters in Alaska), she earned a degree in journalism from Indiana University-Bloomington and went on to work in communications, living in Fort Wayne, Bloomington, and Cincinnati. She is the recipient of a 2009-10 Greer Artist Fellowship grant and a 2008 Ropewalk Writers Retreat Masters Creative Non-fiction Workshop Scholarship.

These days, she gardens and writes in Bloomington, Indiana, relishing every sweet day with a thirst for sorting, rejecting, and adapting to the infinite stream of ideas that flow into our lives.