Ethnicity: African-American

Nationality 1: American

Birthdate: 1959

Carl Phillips was born on July 23, 1959, in Everett, Washington. As the product of a mixed-race marriage—his father was a medic in the Air Force and an African American, while his mother, a painter and homemaker, was white—he grew up with the sense of being an outsider. This outsider status was exaggerated by the fact that his family moved constantly in the first ten years of Phillips's life, as his father was assigned to different military bases throughout the United States and Europe. It was while he was living in Zweibrücken, Germany, when he was a young teen, that he first discovered an affinity for languages. He studied Latin and Greek when the family returned to America, showing such proficiency that he majored in those languages at Harvard, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1981. He wrote some poetry...