Los Angeles Times 

Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including, most recently, the novel Hum (Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci Books, 2024). Her novel The Need (Simon & Schuster, 2019; Chatto & Windus, 2019) was long-listed for the National Book Award and named a New York Times Notable Book of 2019.

Helen's short story collection Some Possible Solutions (Henry Holt, 2016) received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (Henry Holt, 2015), a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her collection And Yet They Were Happy (Leapfrog Press, 2011) was named a notable collection by The Story Prize and was re-released in 2023. She is also the author of the children’s eco-adventure book Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green (Delacorte Press, 2012).

Helen has received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the Iowa Review Nonfiction Award, and the DIAGRAM Innovative Fiction Award.

Her work has been featured on Selected Shorts and in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and the New York Times, among others. Her books have been or will soon be translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, and Spanish.

A graduate of Yale and the Brooklyn College MFA program, she is a professor at Brooklyn College. Born and raised in Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn with artist/cartoonist Adam Douglas Thompson, their children, and their dog.