ST. LOUIS — A professor in the Washington University English department was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Carl Phillips, a celebrated poet and professor of English at Washington University, was awarded the prize for "Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020."
"The new poems, written in a time of rising racial conflict in the United States, with its attendant violence and uncertainty, find Phillips entering deeper into the landscape he has made his own: a forest of intimacy, queerness, and moral inquiry, where the farther we go, the more difficult it is to remember why or where we started," the Pulitzer Prize announcement said of the collection.
The prize includes $15,000 and is awarded annually for a "distinguished volume of original verse by an American author."
This is not the first award Phillips has received for his work. His other awards include the 2001 Pushcart Prize for “To the Tune of a Small, Repeatable, and Passing Kindness,” the 2002 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize for "The Tether" and the 2021 Jackson Poetry Prize.
Phillips has been a professor in the Department of English and the African and Afro-American Studies Program since 2000 and was previously the director of the university's writing program.
According to the university's website, Phillips is the fifth faculty member to win a Pulitzer Prize, including four for poetry or poetry letters.
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