An Afternoon of New Fiction with Helen Phillips & Thomas Grattan in Person at HVWC

Join Jennifer Franklin and Lauren Acampora as they welcome Helen Phillips (Hum) and Thomas Grattan (In Tongues) as they read from their new novels.

Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including, most recently, the novel The Need, a National Book Award nominee, a New York Times Notable Book, and a TIME Magazine Top 10 Book of 2019. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, and the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, a New York Times Notable Book, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her debut collection, And Yet They Were Happy, was named a notable collection by The Story Prize and is being re-released in 2023. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic and the New York Times, and on Selected Shorts. She is an associate professor at Brooklyn College. Her novel Hum is forthcoming in 2024 from Marysue Rucci Books at Simon & Schuster.

Thomas Grattan’s novel The Recent East, published by MCD Books/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, was a New York Times editor’s choice, longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Novel Prize. His new novel In Tongues is forthcoming from MCD Books/ Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. His short fiction has appeared in several publications, including One Story, Slice, and The Colorado Review. He received his MFA from Brooklyn College and lives in New York City.