Deesha Philyaw

Award-winning Writer
National Book Award Finalist

Readings &
Lecture Topics
  • Writing About Journeys Not Your Own
  • Good Girls Don’t, Black Girls Will
  • Ain’t I a Mommy? Narratives of Motherhood & Race
  • The Mythical Sisterhood of Black and White Women
  • Choosing You, Telling the Truth
  • An Evening with Deesha Philyaw

Biography

“Deesha Philyaw uses the comic, the allegorical, and the geographic to examine Black intimacies and Black secrets. Her work is as rigorous as it is pleasurable to read.” –Kiese Laymon

“Tender, fierce, proudly Black and beautiful.” –Kirkus Reviews

Deesha Philyaw is the author of the debut short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (West Virginia University Press, 2020), which won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and a 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; the collection was also a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Her next two books include her highly anticipated debut novel The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman (Mariner Books, 2026), and her second collection Girl, Look, a “poignant new collection, giving a vivid snapshot of the interior lives of Black women across generations, drawing readers to consider Black women and girls’ vulnerabilities, invisibility, and beautiful contradictions, in a post-COVID, post-Breonna Taylor world.”

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where Black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. Nine stories featuring four generations of characters who grapple with who they want to be in the world, the collection was praised as “luminous stories populated by deeply moving and multifaceted characters,” by Kirkus Reviews and “addictive while also laying bare the depth and vulnerability of Black women,” by Observer. Author Tara Campbell notes, “The love in Philyaw’s stories runs the gamut from sweet to bitter, sexy to sisterly, temporary to time tested, often with hidden aspects. The word secret in the title is earned, and some of the secrets are downright juicy.” The Secret Lives of Church Ladies is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing.

Philyaw is co-host of two podcasts, Ursa Short Fiction (with Dawnie Walton) and Reckon True Stories (with Kiese Laymon), through Ursa Story company, which Philyaw co-founded with author Dawnie Walton and former Longreads founder and CEO Mark Armstrong. Philyaw and Laymon’s podcast focuses on “the stories we tell and how they impact our culture,” Ursa says.

Philyaw is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow. She currently lives in Miami, FL.

Short Bio

Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Philyaw is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow, and co-host of two podcasts, Ursa Short Fiction (with Dawnie Walton) and Reckon True Stories (with Kiese Laymon).

Philyaw’s debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, is forthcoming from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2026.

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