Photo by Sue Kwon

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is one of the most vital and versatile writers working today—a poet, essayist, and translator whose work spans forms and continents, eras and disciplines. He is the author of four acclaimed poetry collections—The Ground, Heaven, Living Weapon, and Silver—each a testament to his lyric rigor, formal mastery, and philosophical depth. His poems move fluently between the mythic and the modern, the personal and the historical, composing a body of work that is as intellectually precise as it is emotionally resonant. Heaven and Silver were both longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and named among NPR’s best books of the year.

Phillips’s nonfiction continues this project in another key. The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey won the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing and was hailed by The Wall Street Journal for prose “comparable to John McPhee’s, which is high praise.” His most recent nonfiction work, I Just Want Them to Remember Me: Black Baseball in America, is a sweeping narrative history and elegy—chronicling the rise, artistry, and enduring legacy of Black baseball in the United States. As part of this ongoing work, he served as a curatorial consultant for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s Souls of the Game: Voices of Black Baseball exhibition, which opened in 2024.

He is the poetry editor of The New Republic and editor of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. His honors include a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry, and an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Phillips lives in New York and Barcelona. His work—across verse and prose, analysis and imagination—asks what it means to remember, to reckon, to shape beauty from history’s inheritance. Whether on the page or at the podium, he speaks with the cadence of poetry and the clarity of thought—always cultivating what endures.