As the 2024 season of What The Universe Is: A (Virtual) Reading Series comes to a conclusion, it gives me tremendous pleasure to host Carl Phillips and Erin Belieu, two of the foremost practitioners of poetry writing today, as well as two of the warmest and wittiest human beings I’ve ever encountered.
Carl Phillips is the author of 17 books of poetry, most recently Scattered Snows, to the North (2024) and Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. His other honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets.
Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022); and he has translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles (Oxford University Press, 2004).
He lives on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts.
Erin Belieu’s poetry collection, Come-Hither Honeycomb, was published in February 2021.
Belieu's other poetry collections are Infanta, winner of the National Poetry Series, and chosen one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post, National Book Critics Circle, and Library Journal; One Above & One Below, winner of the Midland Author’s and Ohioana Poetry Prizes; Black Box, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Slant Six, which received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, and was named by the New York Times’s book critic’s one of their 10 Favorite Books of 2014. All of Belieu’s poetry collections are published by Copper Canyon Press.
Belieu’s poetry has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, Poetry, Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, the Academy of American Poet's Poem a Day, and the American Poetry Review. Her poems have been selected on multiple appearances in the Best American Poetry anthology series. Her prizes include the Rona Jaffe Foundation fellowship, and she was recently honored with the Barnes and Noble "Writers For Writers Award, recognizing Belieu’s long career of literary activism, as well as AWP’s George Garrett Prize, honoring her "outstanding literary citizenship” in service to the national writing community.
Belieu also founded the resistance network, Writers Resist, the organization that, in January 2016, hosted more than 100 simultaneous events in different cities worldwide to promote the tenets of democracy, diversity, and freedom of speech.
Belieu has been an educator for over 20 years, teaching workshops and literature courses at Boston University, Washington University, Kenyon College, Ohio University, and Florida State University. She is presently a full professor on the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program faculty. Belieu is also a frequent visiting faculty member for writing programs and conferences throughout the United States and abroad.
Registration is quick and easy at bit.ly/WTUIDec2024