It’s the birthday of Jayne Anne Phillips (b. 1952), renowned author of short stories and novels and often lumped in with the likes of Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff.

Phillips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia. Many of her stories are set in West Virginia and portray the loneliness and hopelessness of characters trapped there. After studying at West Virginia University, Phillips traveled and worked for a couple of years in California and Colorado. She entered the Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1976, the same year that her first short story collection, Sweethearts, was published. Her second, Counting, came out in 1978, but it was her third, Black Tickets (1979), published when she was just 26 years old, that established her reputation as a Thoroughly Great Writer. (Read the 2017 retrospective review of the book here to learn why its stories have stayed with so many readers for so long, and to get a good flavor of the book.)

Phillips’ first novel, Machine Dreams, came out in 1984 and made Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer gush. (Gordimer also gushed about Black Tickets.) Phillips has written several more collections of shorts stories and novels; her most recent novel is Quiet Dell (2013), which is based on the true story of a widow and three children killed in 1931 by serial killer Harry Powers. The novel is set in West Virginia, of course, where the real life murders occurred—Phillips remembers passing the crime scene as a child. (So, a great literary novel to read if you are interested in serial killers, and a great one to avoid if you can’t bear to think about serial killers—speaking as one who still regrets watching snatches of Silence of the Lambs one night in order to avoid writing my master’s thesis. But Quiet Dell sounds so good, so compelling…tempting… Don’t do it, Susan. You’ll never sleep again.)

Phillips has taught at several Illustrious Institutions and is currently doing Great Things at the Rutgers-Newark MFA Program, which she founded. Phillips is or was married and has two sons and two step-sons. It’s hard to know more, since she’s very private, so let’s speculate wildly: maybe she raises zebras. Wouldn’t that be something?

Have a sparklingly sunny Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.