Rowan Ricardo Phillips

1974 –
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Born in New York City in 1974, Rowan Ricardo Phillips earned his BA at Swarthmore College and his PhD at Brown University.

Phillips is the author of five books of poetry: The Milky Way (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2028); Silver (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), which was long-listed for the National Book Award; Living Weapon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021); Heaven (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), also long-listed for the National Book Award; and The Ground (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), for which he received the 2013 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Poetry and the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. 

Also a writer of nonfiction, Phillips is the author I Just Want Them to Remember Me: Black Baseball in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027); The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), winner of the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing; and the essay collection When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (Dalkey Archive Press, 2010). He is the translator, from the Catalan, of Salvador Espriu’s Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth (Dalkey Archive Press, 2012).

Phillips’s other honors include the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, and the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award. In 2013, he received a Whiting Writers’ Award and, two years later, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 2025, he was a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. 

In her review of Phillips’s debut collection, Evie Shockley writes,

The poems in The Ground carry the authoritative descriptions and rhythms of [Derek] Walcott, the philosophical and symbolic flights of [Wallace] Stevens, the subtle humor and cosmopolitanism of [Rita] Dove, but in a language whose musical blend of the contemporary and the timeless is all Phillips’s own. These poems assert cycles—they repeat, recur, and return—but where we end up is not where we started. 

Phillips has taught at Columbia University, Harvard University, Princeton University, and Cornell University. He is Presidential Professor and Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University, poetry editor of The New Republic, and editor of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. 

He divides his time between New York City and Barcelona.