Helen Phillips, ’07, to Be Honored for Her Writings

Brooklyn College alumna, staff member and writer Helen Phillips, an adjunct lecturer and administrator in the English Department’s Creative Writing Program, will receive a 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award at a Sept. 24 reception to be held in New York. The honor includes a $25,000 award.

Phillips, who received a B.A. from Yale University in 2004 and an M.F.A. from Brooklyn College in 2007, is one of six women writers to be honored with the award this year. The awards are now in their 15th year and are presented annually to a half-dozen women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their career.

"As much as I love teaching at Brooklyn College, I’m grateful to have an opportunity to focus more on my writing," Phillips says. "It’s exhilarating to know that I’ll have the luxury of time and energy that will enable me to delve more deeply into my creative work."

The Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award is not the first writing honor that Phillips has received. She is also the recipient of the 2008 Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the 2009 MeridianEditors’ Prize and a Ucross Foundation residency. Her work has appeared in Salt Hill Journal, Mississippi Review and Faultline, and will be included in American Fiction: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers (2010). Another of her works, And Yet They Were Happy, which she describes as "a book composed entirely of one-page linked stories," will be published by Leapfrog Press in 2011.

Phillips plans to use her award to take time off from teaching to concentrate on a collection of short stories and a novel, tentatively titled The Beautiful Bureaucrat.

The five other winners of this year’s Rona Jaffe Writers’ Awards are Krista Bremer, Vievee Francis, Janice N. Harrington, Lori Ostlund and Heidy Steidlmayer.

Best-selling author Rona Jaffe established The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards program in 1995 as the only national literary awards program of its kind dedicated to supporting women writers exclusively. Since the program began, the foundation has awarded more than $1 million to emergent women writers, including several who have gone on to critical acclaim, such as Judy Budnitz, Lan Samantha Chang, Rebecca Curtis, Rivka Galchen, Frances Hwang, Aryn Kyle, ZZ Packer, Tracy K. Smith, Mary Szybist and Julia Whitty.