Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of the novels Beautyland, Parakeet, and 2 a.m. at the Cat’s Pajamas, and the short story collections Safe as Houses and Exit Zero. Beautyland was an American Book Award winner, a National Book Critics Circle Finalist, a New York Times Notable 100 and Time Magazine Top 10 Book of 2024. A two-time winner of the O. Henry Prize, she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction and The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland. In June 2021, “Disrupting Realism,” an online master class and panel she designed to make graduate level resources available at no charge, was attended by 1,300 people. She is currently the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence at Yale University.
