Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Jayne Anne Phillips has been a defining voice in American literature for nearly half a century. A recent review lauded her 1979 debut, Black Tickets, as “a short story collection that remains so compellingly singular that it ought to function as a handbook for short story writers.” It won the inaugural and prestigious Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. Phillips’ later work cemented her legacy as a writer who uses fiction as a tool to give voice to the downtrodden, marginalized, and forgotten. Works of special note include first novel Machine Dreams (1984), Shelter (1994), National Book Award finalist Lark and Termite (2009), and Quiet Dell (2013). All are period pieces set in the author’s native West Virginia. Her latest novel, Night Watch, exhibits these and other trademarks of Phillips’ craft. Set in a backwoods asylum in the bleak, near-apocalyptic aftermath of the Civil War, Night Watch garnered a host of literary honors, including the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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