Born in New York City in 1974, Rowan Ricardo Phillips earned his BA at Swarthmore College and his PhD at Brown University. He is the author of two books of poetry: Heaven, which was a longlist finalist for the National Book Award, and The Ground, for which he received the 2013 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Poetry and the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award.

Phillips is also the author of a book of literary criticism, When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness, and a translation of Catalan poet Salvador Espriu’s Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth. His latest book, The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, chronicles 2017 as seen through the unique prism of its pivotal, revelatory, and historic tennis season.

Phillips has taught at Columbia University, Harvard University, Princeton University, and Stony Brook University, where he was also director of the Poetry Center. A fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, Phillips divides his time between New York City and Barcelona, Spain.