Claire is a poet and activist born in California’s Central Valley and raised in Winston-Salem, NC. She has made central North Carolina home since 2002. Her work has been selected as a finalist for the North Carolina Poet Laureate’s Award and as a Split This Rock Poem of the Week and nominated for Best of the Net. Her chapbook, Mixed State, is available from Dancing Girl Press.

Claire holds a bachelor’s degree in honors English from Scripps College and a master’s degree in public relations with a focus on social change from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which she puts to use managing communications for nonprofit organizations and magnifying the voices of people they serve. She has a weakness for cats, farmers markets, foggy mornings, and justice.

Contact Claire at clairehermannpoet@gmail.com or on Facebook and Instagram.

Chapbook

Mixed State, Dancing Girl Press, 2023

Publications

“Poem for Malinalli” Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review
“Girl in a Glass House” Earth’s Daughters
“Property Record” Earthspeak
“Three Sisters Farming” Ceasura
“Veterinarian’s Daughter” dirtcakes
“American Genealogy” Lines + Stars
“Sleepover at the Budget Inn” Southern Women’s Review
“Train to Little Siberia” The Wayfarer: A Journal of Contemplative Literature
“In a photograph of my grandfather” Prime Number
“Coming of age in the surveillance state” Tidal Basin Review
“Runaway” Bracken Magazine and The Bracken Anthology
“Line edit” Wildflower Muse
“Brief love song for my ex-husband,” Love and Ensuing Madness
“Reading W. S. Merwin in the laundromat” Centrifugal Eye
“Night watch, Cannonball North Dakota” Broadsided Press‘s #NoDAPL series
“Driving back to Oakdale” (pdf) you are here: The Journal of Creative Geography
“Cat Lady Primer” Amsterdam Quarterly
“Dominion” Split This Rock Poem of the Week
“Einkorn” Spread the Word: A Pandemic Anthology, Jacar Press
“A tithe to hell” One, nominated for Best of the Net
“Then the lassie thought it fit to start up on her feet,” “Midsummer,” “Putting on her gown,” and “Camellias,” Woodcrest Literary Magazine
“The donkey recalls the flight into Egypt,” Solid Food Press

Readings

SparkCon, September 2018
Board of County Commissioners, Orange County, May 2019

Workshops

Anne Spencer’s Legacy: Home, Community, and the Poetry of Resistance with Rashida James-Saadiya, Jaki Shelton Green, Shaun Spencer-Hester, and kynita stringer-stanback, Split This Rock, April, 2016

Her wounds came from the same source as her power: Poetry about living with mental illness, virtual workshop,  April, 2021