What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez

Claire Jimenez is an American author of Puerto Rican descent. She is the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories (2019) and the novel What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (2023), a darkly comic debut novel about a Puerto Rican family in Staten Island searching for their missing sister, who disappeared fifteen years earlier and who may now be appearing on a reality TV show. The novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2024 and was praised for its warmth, its sharp family dynamics, and its portrait of working-class Puerto Rican life in New York. Read more →