Claire Millikin

Claire Millikin holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Yale University, an MFA in poetry from New York University, and PhD in English literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Millikin is the author of ten collections of poetry, including Magicicada (Unicorn Press, 2024), recognized as a 2025 Independent Press Award Distinguished Favorite, and Dolls (2Leaf Press, 2021), winner of the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Poetry Book Award. In 2024, she released Gold Trees (Two Ponds Press), a limited-edition fine arts work produced in collaboration with the photographer Joyce Tenneson. Millikin is the coeditor, with Agnes Bushell, of Enough! Poems of Protest and Resistance (Littoral Books, 2020), an anthology that collects the work of twenty-seven Maine-based poets. 

Millikin is also the author of ten books of scholarship on women’s studies and the visual arts, all of which were published under her legal name, Claire Raymond, including Mohawk Rebel: Shelley Niro’s Art and New York State (State University Press of New York, 2025) and The Selfie, Temporality, and Contemporary Photography (Routledge, 2021).

Millikin’s other honors include the W. B. Yeats Poetry Prize, the Charles Simic Poetry Prize, and the Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize. After teaching at the University of Virginia for many years, she now teaches art history and writing at the University of Maine and lives in coastal Maine.