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BUCKHANNON -- An award-winning author is returning to her Upshur County hometown to speak this week.
On Thursday, Buckhannon native and internationally-acclaimed writer Jayne Anne Phillips will present "An Evening with Jayne Anne Phillips."
The event will begin at 6 p.m. at the Buckhannon Opera House on 12 E Main Street.
"I'm so glad to be coming to Buckhannon," she said. "There's just no substitute for having grown up in West Virginia."
Phillips recalls that, when she was growing up in Buckhannon, she used to read her fellow Girl Scouts chapters from her first "novel" at their meetings.
"Myself and all my friends were in the novel," she said. "And then the heroine moves to New York City and falls in love with a gang member. And there are wars going on in the subway tunnels and all. The interesting thing was that they kept wanting to hear it, even after they'd been written out. And that was my first sense of writing something that people were interested in."
She grew up to be an internationally-acclaimed writer, published in 12 languages, and is the winner of an Academy Award in Literature and other prestigious awards and fellowships.
Phillips has been a National Book Award nominee, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and numerous other awards. She is the founder of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Rutgers University.
Thursday's event is co-sponsored by Argo Books and Voices of West Virginia (www.voicesofwv.org), a new website that makes it easy for West Virginians to connect with 14 of West Virginia's finest writers, including Phillips.
The event is free to the public. Donations will be accepted to help pay the evening's expenses. Tickets will be available without charge at Argo Books in Buckhannon and online at eventbrite.com. Seating is limited."
Phillips has set most of her novels in West Virginia. "Machine Dreams" is set in central West Virginia during the Depression. "Lark and Termite" alternates between Buckhannon and Korea. "Quiet Dell" creates a fictional version of the infamous Quiet Dell murders.
Her latest novel, "Night Watch," which was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New Yorker magazine, follows a mother and daughter as they navigate treacherous times during and after the Civil War. The novel is set in West Virginia, partially at the TransAllegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston. During Thursday's event, Phillips will talk about the mix of historical research and fiction in "Night Watch," read from the book, and answer questions from the audience.