Marie-Helene Bertino

Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of, most recently, Beautyland, a National Book Critics Circle Finalist and a New York Times Notable 100 and Time Magazine Top 10 Book of 2024. A 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction, she is currently the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence at Yale University. Bertino is also the author of the short story collections Safe as Houses, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and Exit Zero and the novels 2 a.m. at The Cat’s Pajamas and Parakeet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Tin House, McSweeneys, Granta, BOMB, Guernica, and many others. Her honors include the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, and the Pushcart Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories, and Mississippi Review 30, and has been featured on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” program. She taught for many years in the Creative Writing programs of NYU, The New School, and Institute for American Indian Arts. Bertino read at Vanderbilt on November 6, 2025. This pop-up exhibit was inspired by Beautyland.