Carl Phillips

Washington University professor Carl Phillips is a poetry finalist for this year’s National Book Awards.

“Speak Low,” published by Farrar Straus & Giroux, is one of five titles in the poetry category, the National Book Foundation announced today. The awards will be given Nov. 18 in New York.

Phillips has won many poetry honors, including the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts poetry award. He was a National Book Award finalist in 2004 and 1998.

Of the latest nomination, he said today he was “honored, surprised, excited.”

He doesn’t necessarily expect to win, but says “it is pretty special to be singled out at all… Many of the most significant poets in American letters have never won the award or been nominated.” In April, poet Jenny Mueller reviewed his latest book for the Post-Dispatch, saying “Theme and style join perfectly in “Speak Low,” Carl Phillips’ 10th collection of poetry. In poem after poem, the speaker turns to address questions of power. The style of the poems, as they frame and shape these questions, feels at once pliant and masterful.”

Poetry awards and nominations can bring new attention to a book, Phillips says, but it’s “not like an Oprah book.”

This semester at Washington University he is teaching a course about American poetry since the 1950s. Phillips has lived in St. Louis at least part time since 1993, but still owns a cottage in Massachusetts, where he lives during part of the year.

Here is the list of finalists for the National Book Award:

Fiction
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House)
Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf)
Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 

Nonfiction
David M. Carroll, Following the Water: A Hydromancer’s Notebook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Sean B. Carroll, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt)
Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (Princeton University Press)
T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Alfred A. Knopf)

Poetry
Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan University Press)
Ann Lauterbach, Or to Begin Again (Viking Penguin)
Carl Phillips, Speak Low (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (University of California Press) 

Young People’s Literature
Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith (Henry Holt)
Phillip Hoose, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
David Small, Stitches (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic)
Rita Williams-Garcia, Jumped (HarperTeen/HarperCollins)