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Carl Phillips is a graduate of Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts. He taught high school Latin for eight years and is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Speak Low (2009) that was a finalist for the National Book Award and Double Shadow (2011), also a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has received numerous awards and honours, including the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Award in Poetry, a Lambda Book Award and the Thom Gunn Award for Best Gay Male Poetry, as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Library of Congress. Phillips was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006. He teaches at Washington University, in St. Louis, Missouri.

Judges’ Citation

Carl Phillips is a poet of the line and a poet of the sentence, both at once.