Graduate School-Newark
School of Public Affairs & Administration
Rutgers University is proud to welcome Jayne Anne Phillips, professor of English and director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at Rutgers University in Newark, as the faculty speaker for this year’s commencement ceremony.
As developer and director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program, Phillip draws upon the urban energy of Newark and the diversity of the Rutgers campus to create a program that inextricably infuses real world experiences with creative work and intellectual rigor. Founded in 2007, the program was named one of the "Five Up-and Coming Programs in Creative Writing in the U.S." in July 2007 by The Atlantic, before the program had even hosted its first class.
Phillips is a widely acclaimed novelist and short story writer. She received national attention with the publication of 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. Her other works include four novels: Machine Dreams (1984); Shelter (1994); MotherKind (2000);
and Lark and Termite (2009), as well as Fast Lanes (1987), another collection of short stories.
Lark and Termite, Phillips' newest novel, released January 6, has received outstanding reviews from the New York Times,
National Public Radio, and Publishers' Weekly. According to New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani, "Jayne Anne Phillips's
intricate, deeply felt new novel reverberates with echoes of Faulkner, Woolf, Kerouac, McCullers and Michael Herr's war reporting, and yet it
fuses all these wildly disparate influences into something incandescent and utterly original."
Machine Dreams, Phillips' first novel, made the New York Times Best Seller list. It was nominated for the National Book Critics
Circle Award and chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of fourteen Best Books of the Year in 1984.
Shelter received an Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Publishers Weekly also selected it as one of the Best Books of the Year in 1994.
MotherKind was nominated for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. The Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction is one of the United Kingdom's most prestigious literary prizes, awarded annually for the best original full-length novel by a female author of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK in the preceding year.
Phillips is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Bunting Fellowship, and a Howard Foundation
Fellowship. Her work has been translated into twelve languages and has appeared in Granta, Harper's, DoubleTake, and
The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction.
Born and raised in West Virginia, Phillips received a bachelor's degree in English from West Virginia University and a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She has taught at Harvard University, Williams College, Boston University and Brandeis University.
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