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.

The Turnbull Lectures have run almost continually since 1891, and are always done on the topic of poetry. Over the history of the series, lectures have been given by Ramón Menéndez Pidal, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Jacques Derrida, W.S. Merwin, Helen Vendler, and many others. Recent lecturers have included Anne Carson, Natasha Trethewey, Robin Coste Lewis, Alice Oswald, Tracy K. Smith, Terrance Hayes, Richard Wilbur, Stanley Plumly, Edward Mendelson, and Edna Longley.