Emilia Phillips (they/them) is a poet, nonfiction writer, and book reviewer. They are the author of five poetry collections from the University of Akron Press, including Nonbinary Bird of Paradise (forthcoming February 2024) and Embouchure (2021), and four chapbooks. Winner of a 2019 Pushcart Prize, 2015 StoryQuarterly Nonfiction Prize, and the 2012 The Journal Poetry Prize, Phillips’s poems, lyric essays, and book reviews appear widely in literary publications including The Adroit Journal, Agni, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New York Times, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. They are an Associate Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English; MFA in Writing Program; and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at UNC Greensboro, where they regularly teach MFA- and undergraduate-level poetry workshops, Queer Poetry & Poetics, and Women’s Health & Bodies.
Phillips is at work on several projects: a new poetry collection that features poems that utilize historical information and archival materials to document and ekphrastically memorialize the former sites of historical queer spaces, especially lesbian bars; SQAR: A Memoir of Cancer, Disfigurement, Queerness, and Gender-Affirming Care, which charts their journey from a traumatic medical experience that left them with a facial scar that complicated their self-perception of their gender, led to an acknowledgment that they are nonbinary, and inspired their pursuit of gender-affirming surgery in North Carolina; and, lastly, translating from Spanish into English the poems of Chilean poet and scholar Macarena Urzúa Opazo.
They spent three years writing craft essays for the Ploughshares Blog, three years as the reviews and interviews editor at 32 Poems, four years in various editorial roles at Blackbird, and two years as staff at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. They have attended writing residencies at Buinho Creative Hub in Messejana, Portugal; Gullkistan Center for Creativity in Laugarvatn, Iceland; Can Serrat in El Bruc, Catalonia; and Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. They have received the following fellowships: North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship (2019–2020), Peter Taylor Fellowship for the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop (2015), Bread Loaf Fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (2013), and the Zoland Poetry Fellowship to Vermont Studio Center (2012).
They have collected a substantial number of contemporary poetry broadsides and donated them to UNCG’s Special Collections and University Archives, a department with which they regularly collaborate through teaching, research, and scholarship, especially with letterpress printing and LGBTQIA+ archival materials.
Email Emilia
emiliaphillips@proton.me
Emilia Phillips 