Writers at Newark

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Jayne Anne Phillips

Jayne Anne Phillips was born and raised in West Virginia. Her first book of stories, Black Tickets, published in 1979 when she was 26, won the prestigious Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, awarded by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Featured in Newsweek, Black Tickets was pronounced "stories unlike any in our literature... a crooked beauty" by Raymond Carver and established Phillips as an writer "in love with the American language." She was praised by Nadine Gordimer as "the best short story writer since Eudora Welty" and Black Tickets has since become a classic of the short story genre.

Machine Dreams, Phillips' first novel, published in 1984, elegantly and astutely observes one American family from the turn of the century through the Vietnam War. A New York Times best seller, Machine Dreams was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of twelve Best Books of the Year.

Her next book of stories, Fast Lanes, (1987), praised in the LA times as "stories that hover on the edge of poetry," was reissued by Vintage and includes three previously uncollected stories.

Shelter, her 1994 novel, a haunting, suspenseful evocation of childhood rite-of-passage, was awarded an Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and chosen one of the Best Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly.

MotherKind, “a compassionate and spiritually nourishing novel,”(PW) tells the stroy of Kate, whose care for her terminally ill mother coincidees with the birth of her first child and the early months of a young marriage. She must, iin a single year, come to terms with profound loss and radiante beginnings. Motherkind, which “explores the intuitive bond between mothers and daughters with unforced gracee,” was nominated for the Orange Prize (UK).

Jayne Anne Phillips' works have been translated and published in twelve 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. Her work has appeared most recently in Harper's, Granta, Doubletake, and the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. She has taught at Harvard University, Williams College, and Boston University, and Brandeis University. She is Professor of English and Director of the Rutgers Newark MFA Program. Her books are available in Vintage paperback.

Jayne Anne Shelter reads in the Writers at Newark Reading Series with Roger Sedarat on Tues., January 26, 2010, 5:30-7 p.m., at the Rutgers-Newark Paul Robeson Gallery.