Claire Calderón is an Oakland-based writer and reader with a fondness for stories from the fringes. She has an MFA in creative writing from Mills College and has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, the San Francisco Writers Grotto, and elsewhere. Claire is at work on her debut novel, Tomato Skin, a speculative biography about her Chilean bisabuela’s life in the shadows.
Tomato Skin is an archive of the unsaid. Part memoir, part speculative biography, it follows Claire’s great-grandmother—once a maid for one of Chile’s most elite families—prodding the weighted silence surrounding her past.