Jayne Anne Phillips

Jayne Anne Phillips (born July 1952) is an American novelist and short story writer, born in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia.

Biography

Phillips graduated from West Virginia University, earning a B.A. in 1974. During the mid-1970s, she left West Virginia for California, embarking on a cross-country trip that would lead to numerous jobs, experiences, and encounters that would greatly affect her fiction, with its focus on lonely, lost souls and struggling survivors. In 1976, Truck Press published her first short story collection "Sweethearts", for which Phillips earned a Pushcart Prize and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines Fels Award.

"Sweethearts" was followed in 1978 by a second small-press collection, "Counting", issued by Vehicle Press. "Counting" earned Phillips greater recognition and the St. Lawrence Award. Her next collection, "Black Tickets", published by Delacorte in 1979, was her first commercial success and brought her national attention as a talented and important writer. "Black Tickets" contained three types of stories: brief character studies, inner soliloquies, and family dramas. These stories focused on her characters' loneliness, alienation, and unsuccessful searches for happiness.

Five years after "Black Tickets", Phillips published her first novel, "Machine Dreams", a chronicle of the Hampton family from World War II to the Vietnam War. Phillips followed "Machine Dreams" with "Fast Lanes", a 1984 collection of ten stories, all first-person narratives.

In 1995, Phillips published her second novel, "Shelter", a portrait of the loss of innocence at a West Virginia girls' camp in the summer of 1963. Phillips' next novel was "MotherKind" (2000), winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, a story of intergenerational love and struggles within a family facing many changes.

Phillips' works have been translated and published in twelve foreign languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Bunting Fellowship from the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. Phillips has held teaching positions at several colleges and universities, including Harvard University, Williams College, and Boston University. She is currently in charge of the Creative Writing M.F.A. program at Rutgers University Newark. She and her husband, physician Mark Stockman, have three sons.

Her work is mentioned in the 2006 lectures for The Modern Scholar series "From Here to Infinity" by Professor Michael D.C. Drout. He refers to her style (perhaps borrowed by science fiction writer William Gibson in his book Neuromancer) as "headlong rush of story and description."