Helen Phillips (born 1981) is an American novelist, short-story writer, and professor known for imaginative fiction that blends ordinary domestic life with surreal, speculative, and dystopian elements. She is the author of The Need, a 2019 National Book Award finalist, as well as Hum, The Beautiful Bureaucrat, Some Possible Solutions, And Yet They Were Happy, and the children’s novel Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green. Phillips teaches at Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, artist and cartoonist Adam Douglas Thompson, and their children. Her work has earned honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, and the John Gardner Fiction Book Award.