Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a poet, author, academic, translator, journalist, and screenwriter. Phillips is the author of The Ground, Heaven, The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, and Living Weapon; all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He has also published the influential critical study When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness, which will be republished by FSG in 2021. 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 has been 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. A prodigious sportswriter, Rowan has written on soccer, basketball and tennis for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic and The Paris Review. 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, has been featured in Best American Poetry 2016 and Best American Poetry 2017, and has been translated into Catalan, German, Italian, Norwegian and Spanish. 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.