Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of six books, all published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (2010), The Ground (2012), Heaven (2015), The Circuit (2018), Living Weapon (2020), and the forthcoming Silver (2024). 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 GLCSA New Writers Award for Poetry, the PEN-Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, the Anisfield Book Prize for Poetry, the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, and the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. His work has also been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the NAACP Outstanding Book Award for 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. 

He is currently a visiting professor of creative writing at Princeton, 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.