Helen Phillips

Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including, most recently, the novel Hum. Her novel The Need was a National Book Award nominee and a New York Times Notable Book. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction. 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 re-released in 2023. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic and The New York Times, and on Selected Shorts. A professor at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with artist/cartoonist Adam Douglas Thompson and their children.