Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the award-winning author of The Ground and Heaven, both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, as well as the acclaimed collection of literary essays When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness and a translation, from the Catalan, of Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth. He has been the recipient of the 2016 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, the PEN/Osterweil Prize for Poetry, and the GLCA New Writers Award; he has 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 both the National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award. Published in 2015, Heaven, was selected as a book of the year by NPR and one of the best poetry collections of 2015 by The Washington Post among others. His poetry has been translated into Catalan, German, Italian, Norwegian and Spanish.

Also a prodigious sportswriter, Rowan writes basketball for The New Yorker And The Paris Review. "Just about everything that Rowan Ricardo Phillips has to say about basketball is recommended reading," hails The Millions. His essays on soccer have been featured in The New Republic, The Paris Review, Howler, and Soccer Gods.

Phillips has taught at Harvard, Columbia, NYU, Princeton and Stony Brook University. He is also a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. He lives in New York City and Barcelona.