Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips (born 1959) is an American writer and poet. He is a Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.^[1]

He was a child of a military family, moving year-by-year until finally settling in his high-school years at Cape Cod, Massachusetts. A graduate of Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts, Phillips taught high-school Latin for eight years. His first collection of poems, In the Blood, won the 1992 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, and his second book, Cortege, was nominated for a 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award. His Pastoral won the 2001 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry^[2] (Phillips is gay^[3]). Phillips' work has been published in the Yale Review, Atlantic Monthly, and the Paris Review. He was named a Witter Bynner Fellow in 1998 and, in 2006, he was named the recipient of the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, given in memory of James Merrill. Phillips is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. His poems, which include themes of spirituality, race, sexuality, mortality, and faith^[1], are featured in American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006) and many other anthologies.

Works

• Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
• Riding Westward. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
• The Rest of Love. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
• Rock Harbor. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
• The Tether. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.
• Pastoral. Saint Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press 2000.
• From the Devotions. Saint Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press 1998.
• Cortège. Saint Paul, Minn. : Graywolf Press, 1995.
• In the Blood, selected and introduced by Rachel Hadas. Boston : Northeastern University Press, 1992.

Resources

• Poetry Is His Perfect Expression
• Article at the Library of Congress
• Washington University in St. Louis: Poet Carl Phillips is finalist for National Book Award

References