Marie-Helene Bertino
Marie-Helene Bertino is an American novelist and short story writer. She is the author of two novels, Parakeet (2020) and 2AM at the Cat's Pajamas (2014), and one short story collection, Safe as Houses (2012). She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and an O'Henry Prize for her short stories. Biography Marie-Helene Bertino was born and raised in Northeast Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is of Italian and French Basque ancestry. She holds a B.A. in English from Villanova University and an M.F.A. from Brooklyn College. After moving to New York City in 2003, Bertino worked for a plaintiff's attorney as a biographer for people living with traumatic brain injury. In 2020, she was the University of Montana MFA Program's Kittredge Visiting Writer. She has also been faculty for the Institute of American Indian Arts' Low Residency M.F.A. Program and the M.A. in Creative Writing at University College Cork, an Associate Editor for One Story, and is an editor-at-large for Catapult. She has named Yōko Ogawa, Edward P. Jones, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, and Amy Hempel as influences on her work. She has taught at The New School and New York University. She is currently a lecturer in English at Yale University.