Marie-Helene Bertino

Marie-Helene Bertino is a Lecturer in English and the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence. She is the author of the novels Beautyland (Best Books of 2024 So Far: New York Times, The Guardian, Esquire, among others), Parakeet (New York Times Editor’s Choice), and 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas (NPR Best Books 2014), and the story collection Safe as Houses (Iowa Short Fiction Award). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Tin House, Granta, Guernica, BOMB, among others. Awards include The O. Henry Prize, The Pushcart Prize, Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Mississippi Review Prize, The Center for Fiction NYC Emerging Writers Fellowship and The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Sewanee, Hedgebrook, and New York City’s Center for Fiction. Her short stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2024, Pen/ O. Henry Prize Stories, Gunzo Anthology of American Surrealists, and Mississippi Review 30, and has twice been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She has taught in the Creative Writing Graduate and Undergraduate Programs of NYU, The New School, Institute for American Indian Arts, University College Cork UK, and was the Distinguished Kittredge Visiting Writer at University of Montana. Exit Zero, her second short story collection, will be published by FSG in 2025.