Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of six books, all published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: Silver (2024), Living Weapon (2020), The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey (2018), Heaven (2015), The Ground (2012), and When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (2010). He is also the author of a book-length translation, from the Catalan, of Salvador Espriu’s Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth (2012).

His books have been named a book of the year by the Washington Post, the Guardian (UK), NPR, and the Australian Review of Books.

A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is also the recipient of a Whiting Award, the GLCA New Writers Award for Poetry, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize for Poetry, the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award. and an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

His work has also been longlisted for the National Book Award, and a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry.

A prodigious sportswriter, Phillips has written on sports for the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the Paris Review. His basketball writing has been collected by The Library of America’s seminal collection on the sport, Basketball: Great Writing About America’s Game. His book The Circuit won the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. He served as a curatorial consultant for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s The Souls of the Game: Voices of Black Baseball exhibition, which opened in 2024.

He is currently a visiting professor of creative writing at Princeton where he also serves as the editor of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poetry, a professor of English at Stony Brook University, the president of the board of the New York Institute of the Humanities, and the poetry editor of the New Republic. He divides his time between New York City and Barcelona.