Jayne Anne Phillips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia. She studied at West Virginia University and earned an MFA in fiction at the University of Iowa.
She taught at Harvard, Williams, Brandeis and Boston University, and was a professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark from 2005 to 2020, where she helped establish the MFA program. Her first novel, Machine Dreams, appeared in 1984.
Books
Machine Dreams (1984) · Shelter (1994) · MotherKind (2000) · Lark and Termite (2009) · Quiet Dell · Night Watch
Awards
Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, 1980
National Book Award finalist for Lark and Termite, 2009