Holly Phillips was born on Christmas Day, 1969. She lived most of her early life in the West Kootenay region of southern British Columbia, Canada, and after a couple of stints at university, interrupted by jaunts to Ontario, England, and West Africa, she returned to the West Kootenay and enrolled in the creative writing program at the Kootenay School of the Arts. There she was lucky to number Tom Wayman, award-winning poet and essayist, among her teachers. After three years at the KSA, Holly sold her first short story, "No Such Thing as an Ex-Con", which appeared in the Summer 2000 issue of On Spec, the Canadian magazine of the fantastic.

Since that first sale, Holly has sold short fiction to Event, Dreams of Decadence, Alchemy, HP Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror, Flesh and Blood, Black Gate, and the SF anthologies Land/Space(Tesseract Books, 2002) and Low Port (Meisha Merlin, 2003). She has also sold poetry to Talebones and Asimov's. In the fall of 2001, she was invited to join the editorial board at On Spec, and since then has had the considerable, if occasionally schizophrenic, pleasure of switching between her writing and her editorial hats.

Holly currently resides in a crooked old house on a hillside above Trail, BC. She has a fabulous view down the Columbia valley, almost to the point where the river crosses the border into the US, and shares her abode with a whimsical and talkative cat named Savoy. When she is not writing, she is playing music as one third of Pickled Thistle, hiking, reading, preparing workshops, or watching baseball. Holly is presently taking a break from writing short fiction to work on a novel or two.