Clare B. Dunkle is an American children's fantasy author and librarian.

Born Clare Buckalew on June 11, 1964, she grew up in Denton, Texas, a city north of Dallas. Dunkle earned a B.A. in Russian with a minor in Latin from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. After graduating from Indiana University with a master's degree in library science, she returned to San Antonio to work when her husband, Joe, joined the engineering staff at Kelly Air Force Base. She earned tenure as the monographs cataloger at Trinity University's Coates Library from 1990 to 1999. Dunkle then left the library to homeschool her two daughters, Valerie and Elena.

Her family moved to Germany in 2000 and lived for seven years in the Rheinland Pfalz region, not far from the old Roman city of Trier. They returned to San Antonio in the summer.