A native New Yorker, Millicent Dillon was trained as a physicist and worked in Oak Ridge, Princeton, and Kettleman Hills before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she currently lives. She began to write short fiction in her late 30's, and her first novel was published in 1973. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow (1993) and a resident writer at Yaddo; MacDowell; the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy; and the Djerassi Foundation in Woodside, California.
A five-time O’Henry Award winner, she has published short stories in The Threepenny Review, The Southwest Review, and many other literary magazines. Among her works are novels Harry Gold, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulker Award in fiction, and A Version of Love. Her biographies include A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles and You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles. Her short story “Disbelief” won first prize in the Narrative Magazine Spring 2018 contest, and “The Healer in the Motel” won first prize in the Narrative Magazine Fall 2012 contest. Dillon’s play Prisoners of Ordinary Need was part of the San Francisco Playwrights Festival in 1990. Her most recent essay, “Brief Encounters with the Stars” was published in The Southwest Review.
