The daughter of florists and granddaughter of a prolific gardener, Claire Arbogast was born in 1950. She grew up among the winding streets and deep front porches of historic Irvington on the eastside of Indianapolis. But her life took a wide turn as books and the times challenged her limited perspective of the world. This questioning wove its way into her very fiber, leading her to try on different ways to live, different ways to love, and different ways to write.

After a few years of exploring (southern Indiana, Chicago, California, The Farm in Tennessee, Albuquerque, touring the country in a handmade camper, and a couple winters in Alaska), she earned a degree in journalism from Indiana University-Bloomington and went on to work in communications, living in Fort Wayne, Bloomington, and Cincinnati. She is the recipient of a 2009-10 Greer Artist Fellowship grant and a 2008 Ropewalk Writers Retreat Masters Creative Non-fiction Workshop Scholarship.

These days, she gardens and writes in Bloomington, Indiana, relishing every sweet day with a thirst for sorting, rejecting, and adapting to the infinite stream of ideas that flow into our lives.

Leave the Dogs at Home, a memoir, was published by Indiana University Press in 2015. It is the 2016 AAUP Public and Secondary School Library Selection. If Not the Whole Truth, a novel, is slated for release in September 2024.

Read more about Claire's books, Inside Stories blog, book reviews, and more at www.clairearbogast.com.