Ellen Wilbur has had short stories published in Ploughshares, New Letters, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Georgia Review, The Southwest Review, The Harvard Review, The Yale Review, Agni, and The Iowa Review. Her first book of short fiction, Wind and Birds and Human Voices, was published by Palaemon Press and Stuart Wright and brought out in paperback by New American Library in 1985.
Her stories have been anthologized twice in Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses; The Editor's Choice: Volume III; New Women and New Fiction: Short Stories Since the Sixties, edited by Susan Cahill; Love Stories for the Time Being, edited by Genie Chips and Bill Henderson; Wives and Husbands: 20 Stories About Marriage, edited by Michael Nagler and William Swanson; Eric Clapton's Lover and Other Stories from The Virginia Quarterly Review, edited by Sheila McMillen and George Garrett; and The Situation of the Story: Short Fiction in Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Diana Young.
A recipient of the Emily Clark Balch Award for Fiction given by The Virginia Quarterly Review, Wilbur has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow and a Radcliffe Bunting Institute Fellow (1990–91) and has received an Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship in 1982 and a St. Botolph Foundation grant for fiction in 2005.
In 2003, Wilbur edited The Consolations of God: Great Sermons of Phillips Brooks, which was published by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.