Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips studied Greek and Latin at Harvard University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree. He subsequently earned an MAT in Latin and classical humanities from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an MA in creative writing from Boston University. Having taught at Washington University for many years, he lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

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). 

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.