Amy Bonnaffons Books in Order

Amy Bonnaffons was born in New York City and spent her childhood in Manhattan and upstate New York. Her mother was from a small town in Arkansas, her father from New Orleans, and both came north to work in theater. That gave Bonnaffons a mix of New York pace and Southern storytelling from the start. She has described holiday gatherings full of artists, family friends, and favorite anecdotes told so often they became a kind of family folklore.

Storytelling came early.

She has said she loved listening to adults shape real events into tales with timing, punch lines, and suspense, and she started storing away those rhythms for herself. She studied literature at Yale, then earned an MFA in creative writing at NYU. Later she moved to Georgia for graduate study at the University of Georgia, where she completed a PhD in English and Women's Studies. During those years she published stories, worked with other writers and artists, and kept returning to the kind of fiction she seems to enjoy most, strange on the surface, emotionally exact underneath.

She is also a founding editor of the literary journal 7x7. That collaborative instinct, bringing words into conversation with visual art, shows up across her work.

Her first book, The Wrong Heaven, is a story collection built over roughly a decade. In it, women grieve, desire, and misread themselves in worlds where statues talk, angels show up, and bodies shift in unexpected ways. One of the best known stories, Horse, was featured on This American Life. Readers who connect with Bonnaffons often like the same balance in her work, humor that can turn dark, surreal premises that still feel intimate, and a real interest in sex, faith, loneliness, and the body.

She likes thresholds.

That interest carries into The Regrets, her first novel. The setup is simple and odd in the best way: Rachel, a Brooklyn librarian, meets Thomas, a man at a bus stop who turns out to be dead and only temporarily back among the living. Bonnaffons uses that premise to explore fantasy, projection, and the danger of wanting another person to fit the story in your head. The novel is funny, sad, sexy, and a little bureaucratic about the afterlife, which sounds improbable until you see how naturally she makes it work.

Even her shorter and collaborative projects show the same concerns. Sugar and Cream takes a small relationship crisis, a couple, an ice cream factory, a trip that does not go as planned, and finds the ache inside ordinary disappointment. Infinite Bonheur, her collaboration with photographer Brittainy Lauback, turns toward images, bringing her writing into conversation with a photobook. Across forms, she keeps returning to people caught mid-change, unsure whether they are waking up, falling apart, or finally seeing themselves clearly.

Bonnaffons now lives in Athens, Georgia. She serves as Interim Associate Prose Editor at The Georgia Review, and she has taught writing, literature, and gender studies in universities as well as in elementary schools, hospitals, and a women's prison. She has also led workshops that connect creativity, spirituality, and the unconscious. That range feels right for her work. Her fiction is interested in ideas, but it never forgets the awkward body, the unruly heart, or the weird joke that can arrive in the middle of pain.