Jayne Anne Phillips is a short story writer and novelist. She 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. Her novels include Machine Dreams, Shelter, MotherKind, Lark and Termite and Quiet Dell. She is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the Rutgers Newark MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey. http://jayneannephillips.com/