Carl Phillips (born 1959) is an American writer and poet. He is a Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
He was a child of a military family, moving year-by-year until finally settling in his high-school years at Cape Cod, Massachusetts. A graduate of Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts, and Boston University, Phillips taught high-school Latin for eight years.
His first collection of poems, In the Blood, won the 1992 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, and his second book, Cortege, was nominated for a 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award. His Pastoral won the 2001 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. Phillips' work has been published in the Yale Review, Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker and the Paris Review. He was named a Witter Bynner Fellow in 1998 and, in 2006, he was named the recipient of the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, given in memory of James Merrill. Phillips is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
His poems, which include themes of spirituality, sexuality, mortality, and faith, are featured in American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006) and many other anthologies.
Phillips is a judge for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize. In April 2010, Phillips was named as the new judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, replacing Louise Gluck.