Helen Phillips, a former summer intern for the Vineyard Gazette, was chosen to receive a 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, the foundation announced this week.

The Rona Jaffe awards are given annually to six women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers.

Ms. Phillips received her bachelor’s degree from Yale University in 2004 and her M.F.A. from Brooklyn College in 2007, where she is an adjunct lecturer and administrator in the creative writing program. She wrote for the Gazette during the summer of 2004.

She is the recipient of the 2008 Italo Calvino Prize for Fabulist Fiction, the 2009 Meridian Editor’s Award, and a Ucross Foundation residency. Her work has appeared in Salt Hill Journal, The Mississippi Review, and Faultline, and will be included in American Fiction: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers (2010).

M. Phillips will receive her $25,000 Rona Jaffe award on Sept. 24 in New York city. She plans to use her grant to take time off from teaching for a full year so she can devote herself to working on a collection of short stories and a novel. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.