Rowan Ricardo Phillips’ Book of Poetry Makes National Book Awards Longlist

Photo of Rowan Ricardo Phillips by Sue Kwon

Heaven, a book of poetry by Rowan Ricardo Phillips, an associate professor in the Department of English at Stony Brook University, is a contender on the National Book Awards Longlist for Poetry.

National Book Awards finalists will be announced on October 14, and winners will be announced at a ceremony in New York on November 18.

“It’s a great honor to be included among such marvelous poets on the longlist for the National Book Award for Poetry,” said Phillips. “I put everything I had into Heaven, and it’s a book that means the world to me. You never know when you finish a book how it’s going to go over. Suffice it to say, I’m grateful and deeply moved.”

Phillips is also director of the University’s Poetry Center and was named a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow. In 2013 his book The Ground won the Whiting Writers’Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterwell Award and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writer Award in Poetry. It was also a finalist for the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry.

Phillips received his doctorate in English Literature from Brown University in 2003. He is the author of a book of criticism, When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness, and the translator of Salvador Espriu’s classic Catalan collection of short stories, Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth.

Listen to Phillips read a poem, “Measure for Measure,” from Heaven, or click here to read it in The New Yorker.