Ashleigh Bryant Phillips is a writer from Woodland, North Carolina. She was the runner-up in the Little Miss Watermelon Contest of 1995 in Murfreesboro, NC. She’s a graduate of Meredith College. While there she interned for Grayson Haver Currin at INDY Week, covering the Triangle’s music scene. Ashleigh earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she was mentored by Rebecca Lee, Wendy Brenner, and Clyde Edgerton.
Her debut short story collection, Sleepovers, is the winner of the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, selected by Lauren Groff. It was published by Hub City Press in 2020. Stories from it appear in the Paris Review and the Oxford American. Sleepovers was translated into Italian by Michele Martino and published as Pijiama Party by Bompiani in 2023. In 2024, Sleepovers won the Towson Prize for Literature.
Ashleigh is a Visiting Assistant Professor in creative writing at Appalachian State University. She’s the founder of the Hidden Palace Reading Series in Baltimore. She hosts All You Can Eat on Boone Area Community Radio--tune in.
She’s interested in voice, sound, & memory.
Contact her here.