Berea College  

Jayne Anne Phillips, author of the novels Lark and Termite, Motherkind, Shelter, and Machine Dreams, will read on Friday, March 13, at a celebration of the winter 2009 issue of Appalachian Heritage, a literary quarterly published by Berea College from the Appalachian Center. The winter 2009 issue includes a pre-publication excerpt from Lark and Termite, literary criticism from a French critic, a biographical sketch, and a fascinating essay on Phillips by Meredith Sue Willis, a fellow West Virginia native. Phillips will be reading from Lark and Termite, and is appearing on campus as part of her new book tour. A Lexington Herald-Leader review, reprinted from the Chicago Tribune, calls Phillips’s new book “luminous, haunting and singular,” and assesses that “the novel’s raw immediacy is really quite spectacular.” Set during the 1950s in West Virginia and Korea, this triumphant new novel is a story of the power of loss and love, the echoing ramifications of war, family secrets, dreams and ghosts, and the unseen, almost magical bonds that unite and sustain us. Jayne Anne Phillips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia, attending West Virginia University and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. A New York Times best-selling author, Phillips received a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle Award for her first novel, Machine Dreams, which was also chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of twelve best books of the year. Shelter, her 1994 novel, was awarded an Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and was chosen one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly. Phillips has also taught at Harvard University, Williams College, and Boston University, and is currently Professor of English and Director of a new MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the A