Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, the anthologies Salon Fantastique and Paper Cities, and numerous "Year's Best" volumes.

In 2012, Valente won three Locus Awards: Best Novelette (White Lines on a Green Field), Best Novella (Silently and Very Fast) and Best YA Novel (The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making).

In 2011, her children's novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making debuted at #8 on The New York Times Best Seller list.

[5][6][7] In a 2006 blog post, Valente coined the term mythpunk as a joke for describing her own and other works of challenging folklore-based fantasy.

[8] Valente and other critics and writers have discussed mythpunk as a subgenre of mythic fiction that starts in folklore and myth and adds elements of postmodernist literary techniques.