Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips is the author of 17 books of poetry, most recently Scattered Snows, to the North (2024) and Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. He has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (2022), and he has translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles (2004).

"I’ve found that while initially people used to think I wrote weird sentences and they didn’t know what to make of me, now a lot of writers think it’s kind of avant-garde… it’s one of those things where if you stick around, just do your thing that you’re doing the whole time, it might actually move into trending potential… amusing, but it’s kind of nice because it’s nice to be sixty-five and feel like you’re actually still relevant."

— Excerpt from Oral Memoirs of Carl Phillips,
Baylor University Institute for Oral History

Phillips’s other honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets.

Having taught at Washington University for many years, he lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.