Virginia Pye’s Shelf Life of Happiness won the 2019 Independent Publisher Book Award for Short Fiction. Her novel, Dreams of the Red Phoenix, was named a Best Book of 2015 by Richmond Times Dispatch, and her debut novel, River of Dust, was an Indie Next Pick and a 2013 Finalist for the Virginia Literary Award in Fiction. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in Literary Hub, The New York Times, The Rumpus, Huffington Post, The North American Review, Tampa Review, and elsewhere.

She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA from Wesleyan University where she studied with Annie Dillard. She has worked in publishing, and has taught writing and literature at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania. In Richmond, Virginia, she helped establish James River Writers, a literary non-profit. In Boston, she’s currently an instructor at GrubStreet.

Virginia has been awarded Fiction Fellowships to the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, the Virginia Quarterly Review Conference, and numerous times to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She’s also served as a mentor in the AWP Writer to Writer Program. Virginia is married to John Ravenal, Creative Director of deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and is the mother of two young adult children.