About Phillips

Jayne Anne Phillips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia, in July 1952, feeling always a strong attachment for her small-town community yet yearning for the experiences and influences of a broader world. Phillipsí West Virginia roots would exert an enduring influence on her work, particularly in her first novel, Machine Dreams. Phillips recalls of her hometown that ìeveryone knew everyoneís stories, but the stories were secret. . . . Writing is the telling of secrets [which] can transform and unite one moment with another, and bridge the gulf between time, distance, difference.î She was encouraged to write by then English teacher and poet Irene McKinney, and at eighteen, she left Buckhannon for Morgantown in order to attend WVU, receiving her BA in 1974. During these years she wrote mostly poetry, narrative poems that would become seeds for later stories. After graduation, the call to wanderlust and to see the world beyond West Virginia prompted a cross-country trip to California, with Phillips settling for a time in the African American section of Oakland. By the next year she was in Colorado, contributing to small literary magazines and drawing from the broad range of characters and types who had influenced her on her journey.

In 1976, as Phillips was preparing to enroll in the writing program at the University of Iowa, she published Sweethearts, a collection of one-page prose pieces which won the notice of the literary world and the Fels Award in fiction. Sweethearts was recognized by Pushcart, and Phillips was on her way to the solid literary reputation she enjoys today. At the University of Iowa she studied with Frank Conroy, receiving her M.F.A in 1978.

Phillipsí association with Seymour Lawrence, publisher of Tillie Olsen, Katherine Anne Porter and Kurt Vonnegut, completed her literary journey, and with the publication of Black Tickets in 1979, she became recognized as a major new voice in American fiction. Black Tickets established a motif that would often recur in her storiesóthe isolation of misfits or individuals whose variety of perceptions reflect the universal struggle that all of us have in making sense of the callous world around us. Phillipsí first long work of fiction, Machine Dreams, published in1984, follows the fortunes and misfortunes of the Hampton family from the years following WWII through the Vietnam War. The narrative is told from many points of view, as this West Virginia family slowly disintegrates, its dysfunction a mirror of the greater social dysfunction that accompanied the war and Vietnam-era politics. West Virginia, more than any other state, suffered a disproportionate share of loss to the wars and conflicts that plagued this country throughout the Twentieth Century and into the Twenty-First.

Phillipsí most recent novels have more than lived up to the promise of her early work. Shelter (1994) tells the story of lost innocence and explores the meaning of evil, through a range of characters and within a setting that again is drawn from Phillipsí West Virginia roots. Her most recent novel, MotherKind (2000), turns to Boston, Phillipsí current home, for a portion of the setting. In MotherKind Phillips explores the family relationships we forge in our complex world today, where children, step-children, and the transience of our lives weighs against the stasis of the past. Phillips also grabbles with the two most basic life-journeys and moments of transitionóbirth and death. Phillips has spent the last several years writing and teaching at a variety of institutions including Harvard, Williams College, Boston University, and Brandeis. Her books have been translated into twelve foreign languages and anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The OíHenry Awards anthology, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and American Short Story Masterpieces.

Black Tickets won for Phillips the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, awarded by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1980), while the stories in Fast Lanes have been universally acclaimed and hailed for their ability to portray a range of voices and characters that are both true to the region and true to human nature across time and place. Like her short stories, Phillipsí novels have won a variety of plaudits and awards. MotherKind was nominated for The Orange Prize in England in 2001, while her family chronicle and Vietnam era novel, Machine Dreams, received a best novel nomination by the National Book Critics Circle and a New York Times Best Book award in 1984. Phillips was recognized by the Academy Award in Fiction in 1994 for her ìbody of work.î Phillips is recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1988), two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Houghton Mifflin Fellowship (1978), and she was a Bunting Institute Fellow in Fiction in 1980. Early volumes also garnered awards as well: the Fells Award in Fiction for Sweethearts (1976) and the St. Lawrence Award for Fiction for Counting (1979).