West Virginia author Jayne Anne Phillips, who has received acclaim for her novel Quiet Dell and other works, will speak on the Fairmont State University campus on Thursday, Sept. 11.
The event, sponsored by the Office of Student Activities, will take place from 7 to 9 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 11, in the Falcon Center third floor conference rooms. Admission is free and open to the public.
Jayne Anne Phillips was born and raised in West Virginia. Her first book of stories, Black Tickets, published in 1979 when she was 26, won the prestigious Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, awarded by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Featured in Newsweek, Black Tickets was pronounced “stories unlike any in our literature…a crooked beauty” by Raymond Carver and established Phillips as an writer “in love with the American language.” She was praised by Nadine Gordimer as “the best short story writer since Eudora Welty” and “Black Tickets” has since become a classic of the short story genre.
Phillips’ fifth novel, Quiet Dell, based on a true story, concerns the infamous 1931 murders committed in a hamlet of the same name near her hometown in West Virginia. Con man Harry Powers led a double life, and preyed on vulnerable widows he met through matrimonial agencies. He imprisoned and murdered an Illinois widow and her three children (ages 14, 12 and 9), and a Massachusetts divorcée, all of whom came to Quiet Dell willingly. The tragedy was one of the first nationally sensationalized crimes in America; the story preoccupied a rural town and the Depression-era nation for months.
The Frank and Jane Gabor West Virginia Folklife Center’s library will display some of Phillips’ works and papers from the Moore West Virginia Literary Collection contributed to the center by Jim and Phyllis Moore of Clarksburg. Phillips also is featured on the front of the West Virginia Literary Map, created by the Folklife Center and titled “From a Place Called Solid: West Virginia and its Writers.” An exhibit in the second floor Ruth Ann Musick Gallery of the Folklife Center will focus on Louise McNeill Pease and the other women authors featured on the front of the literary map, “The Ladies in the Front Row.” For more information about the map, visit http://www.fairmontstate.edu/folklife/west-virginia-literary-map
