For It Felt Like Power

CARL PHILLIPS / WALLACE STEVENS POEM PROJECT

Described as “one of America’s most original, influential, and productive of lyric poets,” Carl Phillips is the author of a dozen books of poetry and two works of criticism. His most recent books of poetry are Silverchest (2013), Double Shadow (2011, winner Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry and finalist for the National Book Award), and Speak Low (2009, finalist for the National Book Award). Graywolf Press has published two collections of his essays: The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (2014) and Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (2004). Oxford University Press published Phillips’s translation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes (2003). His work has been anthologized in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, (Vintage Books, 2003), Gay and Lesbian Poetry In Our Time, (St. Martin’s Press, 1988); and The Vintage Book of African American Poetry (Vintage Books, 2000).

Phillips’s honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pushcart Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress. Phillips served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2006 to 2012. He is Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the Creative Writing Program.

Students printed one of Carl Phillips’ poems as a limited-edition letterpress broadside. It was created by Design Center Studio and hand-printed by student artists in the Printmaking studio.