ST. LOUIS – An acclaimed poet and English professor at Washington University in St. Louis has won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
Carl Phillips won the award and $15,000 cash prize for the collection “Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020.” In selecting Phillips, the Pulitzer committee described “Then the War” as “a masterful collection that chronicles American culture as the country struggles to make sense of its politics, of life in the wake of a pandemic, and of our place in a changing global community.”
Phillips is the third faculty member to win the Pulitzer for poetry. Howard Nemerov received the award in 1978 for his “Collected Poems,” and Mona Van Duyn was bestowed the honor in 1991 for “Near Changes,” a collection of poems.
The Pulitzer Prizes were established in 1917 by Columbia University thanks to an endowment by Joseph Pulitzer, a politician and publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and New York World newspapers. They’re awarded in the fields of journalism, books, drama, music, and special citation.
