Wednesday, September 26, 2007
7:30 PM

Rutgers Student Center, Multipurpose Room
126 College Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ

Parking: Lots 26, 30, and the College Avenue Deck
See Map

Admission: Free and open to the Rutgers community and the general public

The reading will be followed by a reception and book signing.

Jayne Anne Phillips is a widely acclaimed novelist and short story writer. She was catapulted to national attention by her first book of short stories, Black Tickets (1979) which won the prestigious Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction awarded by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Nadine Gordimer hailed Phillips as “the best short story writer since Eudora Welty.” Her most recent novel, MotherKind has further established her as “an abundantly talented writer” (The New Yorker) with “an extraordinary ability to reflect the texture of real life” in her work (Washington Post). Phillips’s work focuses on family drama, particularly the disillusionment and disenfranchisement of American families in recent history. Machine Dreams (1984), her first novel, follows one American family from the turn of the century through the Vietnam War.   Later novels, Shelter (1994) and MotherKind (2000), evoke childhood rites of passage, the persistence of family ties despite alienation, and timeless questions of life and death. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Bunting Fellowship from the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, Phillips is currently Professor of English and Director of the MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey.

Writers at Newark Reading Series
MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers-Newark

Department of English
Office of the Vice President for Undergraduate Education
Office of the Associate Vice President for Academic and Public Partnerships
Rutgers Federal Credit Union
Friends of Rutgers English
Plangere Writing Center
Writers House