Pitt’s Center for African-American Poetry and Poetics has selected Xandria Phillips as its 2021-23 Creative Writing Fellow.

Phillips, a poet and visual artist from rural Ohio, also is the Whiting Awards’ 2021 Winner in Poetry.  The awards — $50,000 each — are given annually to 10 emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.

The recipient of the Judith A. Markowitz Award for emerging writers, Phillips has received fellowships from Oberlin College, Cave Canem, Callaloo, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and Brown University. Their poetry has been published in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. “HULL,” the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award, is their first book.

The CAAPP Fellowship in Creative Writing is for poets who have completed an MFA or Ph.D. and have published no more than one full-length book. While the primary goal is to provide an early-career poet with time and space to pursue their own creative work, the fellow also teaches one community workshop each year; is a guest presenter in the course Studio in African American Poetry and Poetics; participates in Co-Lab, the interactive public forum in which visiting writers and artists present their work in progress; gives one public reading with a Q&A; facilitates one session of the Writers’ Café; and has the possibility of teaching a course at the University.

Phillips is the third person to receive the Fellowship in Creative Writing. Rickey Laurentiis was the inaugural fellow from 2017-19. Justin Phillip Reed held the fellowship from 2019-21.

Read more about the Creative Writing Fellowship and Phillips in The Pitt News.