Helen Phillips

Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including, most recently, the novel Hum, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction. Her novel The Need was longlisted for the National Book Award and named a New York Times Notable Book. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, a New York Times Notable Book, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her debut collection, And Yet They Were Happy, was named a notable collection by The Story Prize and was re-released in 2023. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the New York Times, and on Selected Shorts. She is a professor at Brooklyn College.