Carl Phillips at John Rylands Library

Part of Manchester Literature Festival, the annual John Rylands Poetry Reading with Manchester’s Carcanet Press is an event all in itself, and this year is no exception, welcoming “one of America’s most original, influential, and productive of lyric poets” Carl Phillips, shortlisted for the Best Single Poem in the 2022 Forward Prizes for Poetry with ‘Scattered Snows, to the North’.

The Los Angeles Review of Books calls Carl Phillips “a poet of enchantment and persuasion” and he is one of America’s most celebrated poets, the author of a dozen books of poetry.

The Los Angeles Review of Books calls Carl Phillips “a poet of enchantment and persuasion” and he is one of America’s most celebrated poets, the author of a dozen books of poetry, two collections of selected poems, two works of criticism and essays, and a translation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes (2003, Oxford University Press). He is Professor of English at Washington University in St Louis, where he also teaches creative writing. His debut book In the Blood was the winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize in 1992 and his poetry is published for the first time in the UK 20 years on; Then The War and Selected Poems, 2007-2020 is out with Carcanet and described by Publishers Weekly as “lyrically rich, insightful poems…full of palpable aching”.

Phillips’s other books of poetry are Pale Colors in a Tall Field (2020), Wild Is the Wind (2018), Reconnaissance (2015), Silverchest (2013, nominated for the Griffin Prize), Double Shadow (2011, winner Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry and finalist for the National Book Award), Speak Low (2009, finalist for the National Book Award), Riding Westward (2006), The Rest of Love (2004), Rock Harbor (2002), The Tether (2001, winner of the Kingsley Tuft Poetry Award), Pastoral (2000) and Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006. 

Phillips’s honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress and he was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006. He is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Academy of American Poets Prize, and a Pushcart Prize, and he has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also the winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and since 2011 he has served as the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

Hosted by Carcanet’s John McAuliffe, Professor of Poetry at the University of Manchester, and presented in partnership with the Centre for New Writing and Creative Manchester, all ticket holders are invited to head over to Deansgate from 6pm for a pre-event glass of wine. Find out more about the Manchester Literature Festival 2022 programme, running 7 to 23 October, here.