Helen Phillips’s fifth book, the novel The Need, was published in 2019 in the US and in the UK. Helen’s short story collection Some Possible Solutions received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Young Lions Award. Her collection And Yet They Were Happy was named a notable collection by The Story Prize. Her children’s adventure book Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green was published internationally as Upside Down in the Jungle. Helen has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the Iowa Review Award in nonfiction, the DIAGRAM Innovative Fiction Award, and a Ucross Foundation Residency.

Her work has been featured on Selected Shorts, at the Brooklyn Museum, and in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Tin House, among others. Her books have been translated into Chinese, Italian, German, Korean, Polish, and Spanish. A graduate of Yale and the Brooklyn College MFA program, she is an associate professor at Brooklyn College. Born and raised in Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, artist Adam Douglas Thompson, and their children.