Carl Phillips is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Speak Low, finalist for the 2009 National Book Award, and Double Shadow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011). He has also written a book of prose, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (Graywolf, 2004) and translated Sophocles's Philoctetes (Oxford, 2004). His awards include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize, the Thom Gunn Award for Best Gay Male Poetry, and fellowships and prizes from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets, to which he was named a Chancellor in 2007. Phillips teaches at Washington University, in St. Louis.