Ashleigh Bryant Phillips

Ashleigh Bryant Phillips is a writer from Woodland, North Carolina. Her debut collection of short stories, Sleepovers, was selected by Lauren Groff as the winner of the 2019 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize. Sleepovers is a kaleidoscopic view of a rural community, an amphitheater for overlooked voices, dreams, and revelations. The New Yorker called the collection “mesmerizing, generous, and gloriously recognizable.” Phillips’ short stories have appeared in The Paris Review, The Oxford American and others. They’ve also been translated into Italian and Urdu. Having grown up in a low-literacy community, Phillips’ work is centered in orality and explores sound as well as memory, identity, and place. She is a graduate of Meredith College, earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at Appalachian State University. 

This bio/description was originally published in 2022. For more current information, please refer to the award recipient's website (if provided).