Deesha Philyaw
Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (West Virginia University Press, 2020), won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, the 2020 Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Deesha’s debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, is forthcoming from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2026. (Updated 7/2025)