A glimpse of Jayne Anne Phillips

 When Jayne Anne Phillips was growing up in Buckhannon, she used to write serial novels to entertain her friends.  "Myself and my friends were in the novel," she said. She'd read chapters to her friends at Girl Scout meetings in the Baptist church.

"I had an unquenchable hunger to write," she said.  She realized, early on that, "many times, you write what you never intended to write. The writing has a kind of evolution that you can't plan and can't limit. And that's what's so miraculous about it."

Now her books have been published in 12 languages. She writes about people, often children, dealing with devastating problems: abuse, alcoholism, death, while they live otherwise normal lives. Most of her novels are set in West Virginia at different times in state history. "The whole story of my mother's life and her mother's life were stories I grew up with. And the stories of their lives were connected to political events. The Civil War. The Depression. World War II." Her stories go in many directions, "but I always start with something real."   

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 Jayne Anne Phillips Nationa is a two-time National Book Award finalist and twice a National Book Critic’s Circle Award finalist in fiction. She was awarded  fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim, Howard, Bunting Institute, and Rockefeller Foundation. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is also the mother of two boys. 

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