Jayne Anne Phillips

Jayne Anne Phillips was born on July 19, 1952, in Buckhannon, West Virginia. She earned a BA from West Virginia University in 1974 and an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has taught at Harvard, Williams College, Brandeis, and Rutgers University-Newark, where she founded and directed the MFA programme in Creative Writing from 2005 to 2020. Her writing career began with acclaimed short story collections including Black Tickets (1979). Her debut novel Machine Dreams (1984), a chronicle of a family from World War II to Vietnam, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Subsequent novels include Shelter (1994), MotherKind (2000), Lark and Termite (2008, National Book Award finalist), and Quiet Dell (2013). Her most recent novel Night Watch (2023), set in a Civil War veterans' home in West Virginia, won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.