Souvenir (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Jayne Anne Phillips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia, on July 19, 1952. She began to write at the age of nine as a way to entertain herself and her friends, and at the age of fifteen she became serious about herself as a writer and started to compose poetry. She received encouragement from her mother and a high school teacher, Irene McKinney, who was a poet in her own right. Phillips attended West Virginia University, and continued writing, publishing her work in small literary magazines.

Following her graduation from West Virginia University in 1974, Phillips hitchhiked with friends to California, lived in Oakland, California, for a time, and then moved to Colorado. She held various jobs to support herself during this period and gathered material that has sustained her writing ever since, although perhaps her short story collections most obviously record the lives she led, and the lives she witnessed, during her early adulthood. Eventually Phillips returned to West Virginia, later joining the prestigious Iowa writers’ program.

In 1976 Phillips’s collection of very short stories Sweethearts, was published. By the end of 1979, Phillips had completed the Iowa program, Black Tickets had been published to great acclaim, and she had given up a professorship at California State University at Humboldt in favor of a fellowship at Radcliffe College on the East coast. She also had begun work on her first novel, Machine Dreams. “Souvenir,” with its treatment of educated middleclass characters (a mother, a daughter, and a son), stands out in the collection Black Tickets as one of the longer stories and also as one of the few stories which is not about working-class Americans or more socially marginal characters. Phillips now lives near Boston, Massachusetts, with her husband and children, and she continues to write and publish novels and short stories.