First Light Books is honored to partner with the Harry Ransom Center to host Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jayne Anne Phillips as she discusses her latest work, Small Town Girls (2026).

Book sales, a signing, and a reception will follow the program. Small Town Girls, Phillips’ ninth book and first nonfiction title, is a luminous “writer’s memoir” in essays. Phillips reflects on her origins and the mysteries of memory. In her singular first-person voice, she brings us into her childhood and family, most movingly her closeness with her mother. She writes of her relationships with inspiration, spirituality, culture, and the troubled annals of the last American centuries.

Born in West Virginia in 1952, Jayne Anne Phillips published her first story collection in 1976. The publication of "Black Tickets" in 1979 prompted Nadine Gordimer to call Phillips "the best short story writer since Eudora Welty." A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Phillips is professor of English and director of the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University, Newark. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Bunting Fellowship from the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship, and numerous other awards. In 2024, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel Night Watch.

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