Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Lewis Center for the Arts

Visiting Professor of Creative Writing

Photo by Sue Kwon

About

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of three books of poetry (The Ground, Heaven, and Living Weapon), two books of non-fiction (When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness and The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey), and a translation from the Catalan of Salvador Espriu's landmark short-story collection, Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth. Phillips is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, the Pen/Osterweil Prize for Poetry, the Anisfield-Wolf book award, and the GLCA New Writers Award. He has also been a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the NAACP Image Award for Poetry, and has been a long-listed finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award. The Circuit was the winner of the 2019 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sportswriting. His work has been selected as a book of the year by NPR, one of the best poetry collections of the year by The Washington Post among others, and has been featured twice in Best American Poetry. His poetry has been translated into Catalan, German, Italian, Norwegian and Spanish. His screenplay for the film Clemente, based on Pulitzer Prize-winner David Maraniss' biography of baseball icon Roberto Clemente, is set to be directed by Oscar-winner Ezra Edelman. Phillips is the Margaret Scott Bundy Professor of English at Williams College and teaches Creative Writing at Princeton. He lives in New York City, Williamstown, and Barcelona.