ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS
Distinguished Professor
Ph.D. Brown University, 2003
Poetry
Humanities 2078
Rowan.Phillips@stonybrook.edu
I prefer to be contacted by email.
- Biography
Biography
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is one of the most vital and versatile writers working today—a poet, essayist, and translator whose work spans forms and continents, eras and disciplines. He is the author of four acclaimed poetry collections—The Ground, Heaven, Living Weapon, and Silver—each a testament to his lyric rigor, formal mastery, and philosophical depth. His poems move fluently between the mythic and the modern, the personal and the historical, composing a body of work that is as intellectually precise as it is emotionally resonant. Heaven and Silver were both longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and named among NPR’s best books of the year.
Phillips’s nonfiction continues this project in another key. The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey won the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing and was hailed by The Wall Street Journal for prose “comparable to John McPhee’s, which is high praise.” His most recent nonfiction work, I Just Want Them to Remember Me: A Meditation on Black Baseball and American Life, is a sweeping narrative history and elegy—chronicling the rise, artistry, and enduring legacy of Black baseball in the United States. As part of this ongoing work, he served as a curatorial consultant for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s Souls of the Game: Voices of Black Baseball exhibition, which opened in 2024.
He is the poetry editor of The New Republic and editor of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. His honors include a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry, and an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the Presidential Distinguished Professor in English at Stony Brook University.
- Recent Courses
Recent Courses
Undergraduate Courses
Introduction to Poetry (Undergraduate Lecture)
Introductory Poetry Workshop (Undergraduate Workshop)
Advanced Poetry Workshop (Undergraduate Workshop)
The Art of Verse (Undergraduate Lecture)
History of Lyric Poetry (Undergraduate Lecture)
Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Poetry (Undergraduate Lecture)
Black American Literature Lecture (Undergraduate Lecture)
Contemporary Black Literature (Undergraduate Seminar)
American and Caribbean Connections in Literature (Undergraduate Seminar)
Baseball and Literature (Undergraduate Seminar)
Independent Projects (Various Undergraduate Independent Studies)
On Frank Ocean (Undergraduate Honors Tutorial)
Translating Clarice Lispector (Undergraduate Honors Tutorial)
Graduate Courses
Poetry Movements (Graduate Seminar)
History of Poetic Criticism (Doctoral Seminar)
Period and Tradition Seminar (Doctoral Seminar)
Derek Walcott (Graduate Seminar)
Black Literary and the Theory of the Lyric (Doctoral Seminar)
Multicultural Literature Tutorial (Graduate Seminar)
Seven American Poets (Graduate Seminar)
Poetry and Exile (Graduate Seminar)
Modern American Poetry (Doctoral Seminar)
Practicum in Teaching Literature (Graduate Seminar)
- Publications
publications
I Just Want Them to Remember Me: A Mediation on Black Baseball and American Life. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, forthcoming 2025)
Silver: Poems. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2024/ Faber & Faber: London 2024).
2024 National Book Award for Poetry longlist finalist
2024 Laurel Prize longlist finalist (UK)
Best Books of 2024 selection by The Australian Book Review (Australia)
Best Book of 2024 selection by NPR.
Living Weapon: Poems. (London: Faber & Faber, 2021 / New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020).
Best Books of 2021 selection by The Guardian (UK)
Poetry Book Society Recommendation (UK)
Best Books of 2020 selection by The Australian Book Review (Australia)
Best Books of 2020 selection by Library Journal (USA)
The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.)
2019 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sportswriting
Heaven: Poems. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).
2019 Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award
2016 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry
2016 Griffin International Poetry Prize finalist
2015 National Book Award for Poetry longlist finalist
2015 PEN Open Book Award finalist
Best Book of 2015 selection by The Washington Post and NPR.
Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth [by Salvador Espriu, trans. from the Catalan]. (Champaign, IL.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012).
The Ground: Poems. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).
2013 Whiting Writers’ Award.
2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry.
2013 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Poetry.
Finalist for the 2012 Los Angeles Book Prize for Poetry.
Finalist for the 2013 NAACP Image Award for Poetry.
When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness: Essays.
(Champaign, IL.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2010).
- Honors And Awards
honors AND AWARDS
Academy of American Arts and Letters Award, 2025.
Longlisted finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, 2025.
Longlisted finalist for the Laurel Prize (UK), 2025.
Phi Beta Kappa Poet, Princeton University, Spring 2021.
Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, 2019.
PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sportswriting, 2019
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry, 2016.
Finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, 2016.
Longlisted finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, 2015.
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 2015.
New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU Fellow, 2014.
Whiting Writers’ Award, 2013.
Finalist for the 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry
Finalist for the 2013 NAACP Award for Outstanding Work in Poetry.
PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award in Poetry, 2013.
Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Poetry, 2013.
- Recent Readings and Talks
recent READINGS and talks
Haus für Poesie, Berlin. 2025.
Key West Literary Seminar, 2025.
Yale University, 2024.
Cornell University, 2024.
International Spenser Society, 2024.
National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, 2024.
Harvard University, 2024.
New York University, 2024.
Oxford University. 2024.
Faber and Faber (London), 2024.
Out-Spoken (Southbank, London), 2024.
McNally Jackson Bookstore, 2024.
Couplets Reading Series, 2024.
Key West Literary Seminar, 2016-2020; 2023.
Manhattanville College, 2022.
Blue Mountains Writers Festival (Australia), 2022.
McNally-Jackson Bookstore, 2022.
PEN World Voices Festival, 2022.
University of Utah, 2021.