Heidi Pitlor was born and raised in Concord, Massachusetts. She received her BA in Political Science from McGill University in Montreal in 1992, and her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College in Boston in 1997. Her fiction has been published in Ploughshares.

Heidi is a former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston, where she worked for ten years. Starting with the 2007 volume, guest edited by Stephen King, she became the new series editor for The Best American Short Stories. Since then, she has worked alongside Salman Rushdie, Alice Sebold, and is currently working with Richard Russo.

The Birthdays is Heidi's first novel. It was published in June, 2006 by W.W. Norton in the United States and by Faber and Faber in the United Kingdom. It will also be available in Italy from Einaudi, and in Germany from Heyne.