SHP Reading: Rowan Ricardo Phillips reads with his HVWC students

Continue our celebration of National Poetry Month with a special reading featuring Rowan Ricardo Phillips (Heaven, 2015). He will be joined by six of his HVWC Monday Night Poetry Students.

Born and raised in New York City, poet, literary and art critic, and translator Rowan Ricardo Phillips earned a BA at Swarthmore College and a PhD at Brown University. His poems address post-9/11 memory and ruin, lingering in interrupted landscapes of art, rhetoric, and marginalia. In a 2012 online interview for The Rumpus, Phillips discussed connections between poem-making and world-making, stating, “Poets, especially, as they’re in search of a sustainable way of creating with their language, absolutely must find a way of unraveling the world and making it again. Heraclitus, I believe, said that geography is fate. That, then, is what tethers us to the world. The rest is pulling on that tether.”

Phillips is the author of The Ground: Poems (FSG, 2012) as well as the critical volumeWhen Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (Dalkey Archive Press, 2010). He translated Salvador Espriu’s story collection Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth (Dalkey Archive Press, 2012). Phillips received a 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Poetry. A contributing writer at Artforum, he has taught at Columbia University and at SUNY-Stony Brook. He currently teaches at Princeton University and The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center. He lives in New York City and Barcelona.