WUSTL English professor Carl Phillips wins LA Times Book Prize

Carl Phillips, professor of English in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has won the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry for Double Shadow, his most recent book of poetry.

Carl Phillips
Phillips

Phillips was one of 12 winners recognized during a ceremony April 20 at the University of Southern California. The 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes ceremony honors the best books of 2011.

Double Shadow is Phillips’ 11th poetry collection and was published in March 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It also was nominated for the 2011 National Book Award.

Phillips, also a professor of African and African-American studies in Arts & Sciences, is a four-time National Book award nominee and winner of numerous other prizes in poetry.

The highly acclaimed poet was a National Book Award finalist in 2009 for his 10th collection of poetry, Speak Low; in 2004 for his seventh collection, The Rest of Love: Poems; and in 1998 for his third collection, From the Devotions.

http://youtu.be/3sESR5DruuoCarl Phillips discusses Double Shadow.

His first book, In the Blood, won the 1992 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and was heralded as the work of an outstanding newcomer in the field of contemporary poetry.

His other books of poetry are Cortege (1995), a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry; Pastoral (2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; The Tether (2001), winner of the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Rock Harbor (2002); Riding Westward (2006); and Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006 (2007).

He won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry for The Rest of Love.

Phillips earned a bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, in Greek and Latin in 1981 from Harvard University, a master’s degree in Latin and classical humanities in 1983 from the University of Massachusetts and a master’s degree in creative writing in 1993 from Boston University.

For more information on the prize, visit events.latimes.com/bookprizes.