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.