Claire Robinson
Womxn @ Work 2025

“People think I’m calm, collected and confident. I think I’m stumbling, trying to navigate without knocking things over. As women we’re taught to make ourselves small, quiet. As a fat woman, I have no choice but to be confident in a world determined to see me as otherwise. My attitude is defiance. It’s taken forever to have this confidence, so putting it down is difficult. You need to protect yourself. No one’s going to stop making assumptions because I decide I’m tired of wearing this armor. In a way, that is its own kind of comfort.

If you are a woman, you mother. You are in service to others—that is the expectation and reality. And mothering includes caring, creation, encouragement, planning, sweat, miracles, problem solving, mind reading, determination, sorrow, fear, joy... . It is a blessing and a curse, inescapable and endless, and just monumentally IS, like the sea.”

Claire Robinson (she/her) is an events specialist and a poet, specifically interested in interrogating the intersections of personality and place. She has worked at RISD in different capacities for more than 20 years, largely in the events field, and has helped produce events from New York fashion shows to reunions and commencements.

As a poet, Claire has been writing since the third grade, when she penned an amazing poem about her cat Snowball, complete with a hand-drawn illustration. While working on her BA in English, she was a Connecticut Student Poet, and a Ford Fellow in the writing program at Wesleyan. She has an MFA in poetry from The New School and has had work published in numerous anthologies and journals. In 2023, she released a chapbook of recent work, Just Like a Woman.