Virginia Pye is the author of two award-winning novels, Dreams of the Red Phoenix and River of Dust, and the recent story collection, Shelf Life of Happiness. Her stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in Literary Hub, The New York Times, The Rumpus, Huffington Post, The North American Review, The Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. She lived in Richmond, Virginia for many years and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Find her online at www.virginiapye.com, FB, Twitter, and Instagram.

She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied with Allan Gurganus and Joan Silber. In college at Wesleyan University she learned from Annie Dillard and F.D. Reeve. After graduate school, she served as assistant to Frances Goldin at her literary agency in New York City. Virginia has taught creative writing and literature at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania, in high schools, community centers, and in her home. In Richmond, she helped establish and run James River Writers, a literary non-profit.

Virginia has been awarded Fiction Fellowships to the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, the Virginia Quarterly Review Conference, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She recently served as a mentor in the AWP Writer to Writer Program. She is married to contemporary art museum director John Ravenal and is the mother of two young adult children.