Deesha Philyaw

Deesha Philyaw is an American writer and author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (2020), a debut short story collection centred on the lives of Black women navigating faith, desire, and community in the American South and beyond. Philyaw grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, and studied at Yale University. She is also the co-author of the parenting memoir Co-Parenting 101 (2013). The Secret Lives of Church Ladies won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2021, the Story Prize, the LA Times Book Prize for First Fiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. It is celebrated for its complex, sympathetic, and sensual portrayal of Black women's interior lives—their longings, their faith, their sexuality—in prose that is simultaneously lyrical and incisive. The collection has been optioned for a television adaptation. Philyaw is widely recognised as a major new voice in American short fiction. She is a recipient of a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and has been awarded residencies and fellowships from numerous arts organisations. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.