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Email Marie-Helene Bertino

Marie-Helene Bertino was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is the author of three novels and two short story collections—most recently, Exit Zero, Electric Literature‘s #1 collection of 2025. Her novel 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. Bertino is the recipient of two O. Henry Prizes, the Pushcart Prize, and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland. She is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction and teaches in the Creative Writing Department at Yale University, where she is the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence.

She is also the author of the novels 2.am. at The Cat’s Pajamas and Parakeet, and the story collection Safe as Houses. She taught for many years in the Creative Writing programs of NYU, The New School, and Institute for American Indian Arts. In June 2021, “Disrupting Realism,” an online master class she designed to make graduate level resources available at no charge, was attended by 1,300 people.

She has worked as a biographer for people living with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and an AIDS peer educator. She is certified in end-of-life facilitation for humans and is working toward becoming an end-of-life facilitator for animals. She spent summers living with her grandmother on the Delaware Bay saving hermit crabs, a prehistoric creature with an ecologically important relationship to the migratory Red Knot. She is a lifelong advocate for LGBTQ and animal rights; themes of alienation and everyday divinity run throughout her work.

MHB grew up singing in Church and began singing onstage at age 13. In Philadelphia, she sang in a band named after a Jimmy Stewart character. In New York, she was a music writer for The Deli Magazine, and once attended/ reviewed 26 rock shows in 4 days. Her first short story was about a girl who brings Bob Dylan home for Thanksgiving dinner.

Once while playing volleyball she chased after an errant ball, fell down a hill, and crashed into a beehive. She was stung multiple times but finished the game. For her perseverance she was awarded Camper of The Year. This was at leadership camp, where they teach you to get ten people from one end of a field to another without touching the ground using only two chairs and a 2×4.

She keeps thinking about what Rebecca said, There is nothing a woman can go through that can’t be beautiful.

On a grade school softball team, her nickname was “Peanut.”

Many of her art heroes are film directors and musicians and comedians and women and one is her Mom, a painter and gardener.