Background

Rowan Ricardo Phillips was born in New York City, New York, United States.

Education

Rowan Ricardo Phillips studied at Swarthmore College where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree. Then he went to Brown University where he obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 2003.

Career

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is known as a poet, critic as well as a translator. His first work is the critical volume When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (2010). In 2012, he published a collection of poetry The Ground. A poignant and terse vision of New York City unfolds in this book. That same year he translated from the Catalan Salvador Espriu’s story collection Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth. His second collection of poetry is Heaven (2015). Heaven brims with 38 poems that ask "Who the hell’s Heaven is this?" and then splinters the answers into a night sky’s worth of possibilities. Phillips' recent book is Living Weapon (2020). In his new collection, he explores social ills while celebrating poetry’s ability to provide solace and sense during times of upheaval. The poems from this book are lyrical, imaginative, and steeped in a keen understanding of current events.

In addition to his work in the field of poetry, he is a contributing writer for Artforum Magazine. His poems appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, and Poetry among other publications. The work engages the acts of post-9/11 memory and ruin, lingering in interrupted or merged landscapes of art, rhetoric, and marginalia. A prodigious sportswriter, Phillips wrote on soccer, basketball, and tennis for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The Paris Review. In 2018 he published his sportsbook The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, an energetic, lyrical, the genre-defying account of the 2017 tennis season.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is also known as an educator. He is a professor of English at Stony Brook University where he served as director of the Poetry Center. He previously taught at Princeton University, Baruch College, Harvard University, Warren Wilson College, and Columbia University.

Achievements

• Rowan Ricardo Phillips is an award-winning recognized author as well as an outstanding educator. He is the winner of 2019 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing for the book The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, 2019 Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award for Heaven, 2016 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Heaven, 2013 Whiting Award, 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, and 2013 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award.
  
  He was a finalist for the National Book Award, Griffin Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the NAACP Image Award for Poetry, and the PEN Open Book Award. His work was featured in Best American Poetry 2016 and Best American Poetry 2017 and was translated into Catalan, German, Italian, Norwegian and Spanish.
  
  Phillips is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was also named the W. Ford Schumann Distinguished Visiting Professor in Democratic Studies at Williams College.

Works

More photos

• book

  • When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness

    (In When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness, Rowan Ricardo Ph...)

    2010
  • Heaven

    ("Who the hell's heaven is this?" Rowan Ricardo Phillips o...)

    2015
  • Living Weapon

    (A revelation, a shoring up, a transposition: Rowan Ricard...)

    2020
  • The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey

    (In The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, Rowan Ricardo Phillips ...)

    2018
  • The Ground

    (A work of rare beauty and grace, The Ground is an entire ...)

    2012

Views

Quotations: "The sign on the door of my life hasn’t said, Writer. And yet I write. I’ve always written. But that’s because I’ve always read."

"Poets, especially, as they’re in search of a sustainable way of creating with their language, absolutely must find a way of unraveling the world and making it again. Heraclitus, I believe, said that geography is fate. That, then, is what tethers us to the world. The rest is pulling on that tether."

"A poem is an object in a world of objects. Remembering this leads to remembering that every poem has a form and every poetic form has a history. These histories tend to lead to a breakdown in the form back to a nascent state and inaugural intention as art. This should humble encomium."

"Form is an invisible map. It leads you from poet to poet, century to century, country to country, language to language, culture to culture. At its most inspired, form traces our inspirations, reverences, and innovations; it’s a palimpsest of song and dance. But at its worst, it’s a pyrrhic prize: form as value and for its own sake."

"My sense of poetry, as an object and in a formal sense, is that if you push it and it doesn’t like what you’re up to it will push you back."

"The nuts and bolts of writing a good poem comes, I believe, from understanding how the spirit of free verse should live in a well-crafted formal verse and how the spirit of meter and form should braid a well-crafted vers libre. Everything else seems like talking around writing the best poetry possible."

"I’ve always been drawn to the poetry of poets who write strong criticism. Poets invested in critique, its history, methods, and applications, poets who think through the world critically (which still meant, for them, with feeling: feeling the sensations of thoughts through powerful critique)."

"Both poems and criticism stoke the same inner fires in me and likewise crawl out of that same fire."

Personality

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is entirely agnostic, to both formal and free fundamentalism. Neither makes much sense to him.

Interests

• Sport & Clubs

  soccer, basketball, tennis

Connections

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is married and has two daughters.