Photo by Sue Kwon

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a poet, essayist, critic, and translator. He is the author of four collections of poetry: The Ground, Heaven, Living Weapon, and Silver. Heaven and Silverwere both longlisted for the National Book Award, and Heaven was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His fifth collection, The Milky Way, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

His next book, I Just Want Them to Remember Me: Black Baseball in America, traces Black baseball from the free Black communities of the nineteenth century to Hank Aaron’s 715th home run in 1974. It will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 1, 2027. He served as a curatorial consultant for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s exhibition Souls of the Game: Voices of Black Baseball and gave the keynote address at its opening.

His other books include The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, winner of the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing; the essay collection When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness; and a translation from the Catalan of Salvador Espriu’s Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth. His poetry, essays, and sportswriting have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review, and his basketball writing is collected in the Library of America’s Basketball: Great Writing About America’s Game.

His honors include a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is Presidential Professor and Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University, where he has taught since 2002. He is also the poetry editor of The New Republic and the editor of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. He lives in New York and Barcelona.

I Just Want Them to Remember Me: Black Baseball in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 1, 2027) is available for preorder.