Jayne Anne Phillips (born July 19, 1952) is an American novelist and short story writer who was born in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia. Education Phillips graduated from West Virginia University, earning a B.A. in 1974, and later graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. Teaching Phillips has held teaching positions at several colleges and universities, including Harvard University, Williams College, Brandeis University, and Boston University. She is currently Professor of English and founder/director of the Rutgers University–Newark Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program. During its inaugural year, The Atlantic magazine named Phillips' MFA program at Rutgers–Newark to its list of "Five Up-and-Coming" creative writing programs in the United States. Writing career Short stories Sweethearts (1976) Counting (1978) Black Tickets (1979) How Mickey Made It (1981) The Secret Country (1982) Fast Lanes (1984) During the mid-1970s she left West Virginia for California, embarking on a cross-country trip that would lead to numerous jobs, experiences, and encounters that would greatly affect her fiction, with its focus on lonely, lost souls and struggling survivors. In 1976, Truck Press published her first short story collection Sweethearts, for which Phillips earned a Pushcart Prize and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines Fels Award. Sweethearts was followed in 1978 by a second small-press collection, Counting, issued by Vehicle Editions. Counting earned Phillips greater recognition and the St. Lawrence Award. Her next collection, Black Tickets, published by Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence in 1979 when she was 26, was her first book of stories and brought her national attention as a talented and important writer. Black Tickets contained three types of stories: one page fictions, inner soliloquies, and family dramas. These stories focused on her characters' loneliness, alienation, and unsuccessful searches for happiness. Black Tickets is mentioned in the 2006 lectures for the Modern Scholar series installment From Here to Infinity, by Professor Michael D. C. Drout, who refers to her style—which he asserts was a direct influence on William Gibson's 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer—as a "headlong rush of story and description". Called "the unmistakable work of early genius" by Tillie Olsen, Black Tickets was praised by Raymond Carver: “These stories of America’s disenfranchised – men and women light-years away from the American Dream – are quite unlike any in our literature ... this book is a crooked beauty.” Black Tickets was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction by