carl phillips

Carl Phillips was born in 1959 in Everett, Washington. He is the author of nine books of poems, most recently The Rest of Love (2004), Riding Westward (2006), and Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006 (2007), as well as a translation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (2003) and a book of prose, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Art and Life of Poetry (2004). His poems, essays and translations have appeared in journals such as The Nation, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review. “Carl Phillips is a master of expressive syntax, athletic turns of sentence that mime feeling,” writes Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. “His distinctive sentences, with their parentheses of meditation, their cunning asides, suspended parallels and affecting divagations, are a little bit like Latin and a little bit like intense conversation, with its allusive, mothlike movement.” He is a graduate of Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and his awards and honors include The Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, two Pushcart Prizes, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Award, an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress. The recipient of the Chancellors Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, Phillips was himself named a Chancellor of the Academy in 2006. He is a professor of English and of African and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.