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A Poetry Reading by Carl Phillips

The Department of English will host A Poetry Reading by Carl Phillips Friday, Sept. 27, from 3:15 to 4:15 p.m. at the Mandel Community Studies Center, Room 108.

Carl Phillips is the author of 14 books of poetry. His most recent is Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018), winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, called it “haunting and contemplative as the torch song for which the collection is named.”

His selected poems, Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006, was published by FSG in 2007. Other books include The Tether (FSG, 2002), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Double Shadow (FSG, 2012), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Silverchest (FSG, 2014), a finalist for the Griffin Prize.

A four-time finalist for the National Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Phillips’ other honors include the Lambda Literary Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets, for which he served as chancellor from 2006-12.

His literary criticism and translations include The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (Graywolf, 2014), Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (Graywolf, 2004), and Sophocles’s Philoctetes (Oxford University Press, 2004).

A renowned mentor to a generation of poets, Phillips discussed his process with David Baker in the Kenyon Review: “I work intuitively, wrestling toward a temporary answer to questions that emerge from a struggle that is ultimately utterly private. I think I’m just lucky that my private struggles happen to be, as well, human struggles, so that the poems happen to resonate with other people besides myself.”