Carl Phillips
Carl Phillips is the author of 16 books of poetry, most recently Then the War, for which he won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. Other honors include the 2021 Jackson Poetry Prize, the 2018 Los Angeles Book Prize for Poetry, and in 2019 the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. Phillips has also written three prose books: My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing; The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination; and Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry. Since 1993, Phillips has taught at Washington University in Saint Louis. He and his partner divide their time between St. Louis and Cape Cod. They love exploring the beaches with their rescue dog Emily.
Early Life
Queer and biracial, Phillips spent much of his childhood on air force bases where his father was stationed, before moving to Massachusetts as he started high school. Phillips had planned to study biochemistry and become a veterinarian, but his high school Latin teacher had made him promise to take one course in ancient Greek; he fell in love with the language and decided to major in Greek and Latin. He discovered his passion for teaching in graduate school, after which he went on to teach high school Latin for eight years. It was during this time that Phillips began to be aware of his own queerness, and at the same time – as an unconscious way of wrestling with sexuality – he began writing the poems that would become his first book.
Subjects of His Work
Carl Phillips writes from the intersection of how we wish to conduct our bodies and how society thinks we should conduct our bodies. His poems question morality and our assumptions about it. Subjects include the body, sex, fidelity and betrayal, and power and the restlessness of it (publicly, intimately). He also writes about notions of race and the natural world as backdrop and as inhabited space.
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The Award-winning poet Carl Phillips grapples with issues of authority, identity, and beauty in these sensual and deeply intelligent essays
The "coin of the realm" is, classically, the currency that for any culture most holds value. In art, as in life, the poet Carl Phillips argues, that currency includes beauty, risk, and authority-value...Read More
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With From the Devotions, Carl Phillips takes us even further into that dangerous space he has already made his own, where body and soul--ever restless--come explosively together. Speaking to a balance between decorum and pain, he offers here a devotional poetry that argues for faith, even without the comforting gods or the organized structur...Read More
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A bracingly beautiful new collection from the author of Double Shadow
"After the afterlife, there's an afterlife."
In Silverchest, his twelfth book, Carl Phillips considers how our fears and excesses, the damage we cause both to others and to ourselves, intentional and not, can lead not only to a kind of wisdom but...Read More
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The award-winning poet Carl Phillips's invaluable essays on poetry, the tenth volume in the celebrated Art of series of books on the craft of writing
In seven insightful essays, Carl Phillips meditates on the craft of poetry, its capacity for making a space for possibility and inquiry. What does it mean to give shapelessness a form...Read More
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Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
A powerful, inventive collection from one of America's most critically admired poets
“What has restlessness been for?”
In Wild Is the Wind, Carl Phillips reflects on love as depicted in the jazz standard for which the book is named—love at once re...Read More
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A powerful, inventive collection from one of America’s most critically acclaimed poets.
Carl Phillips’s new poetry collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, is a meditation on the intimacies of thought and body as forms of resistance. The poems are both timeless and timely, asking how we can ever truly know ourselves in the fac...Read More
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WINNER OF THE 2023 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY
A new collection of poems from one of America’s most essential, celebrated, and enduring poets, Carl Phillips's Then the War
I’m a song, changing. I’m a light
rain falling through a vast
darkness toward a different
darkness.
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Poetry Readings
Carl delivers powerful readings of his award-winning poetry.
A Discussion with Carl Phillips
Carl speaks on topics including the art of poetry, the writing life, stamina and perseverance, race, and queerness.
Read about Carl Phillips for the Poetry Foundation
Read an interview with Carl for Image Journal — Forest Sounds: A Conversation with Carl Phillips
Other Speakers
Author, Professor, & New York Times Columnist