Phillip B. Williams

Phillip B. Williams (born 1986) is an American poet. Born in Chicago, he is the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels and Burn, as well as the full length poetry collections Thief in the Interior and MUTINY.

Career He graduated with an MFA from Washington University where he was a Chancellor’s Graduate fellow. For several years he was a faculty member at Bennington College. Williams was a Poetry Fellow at the 2018 Conference on Poetry at The Frost Place. His poetry has been featured in Callaloo, The Kenyon Review Online, The Southern Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, West Branch, and Blackbird. Williams is a Cave Canem Foundation graduate as well as co-editor in chief, with KMA Sullivan, of the online journal Vinyl.

Williams' work has been praised for its "devout and excruciating attention to the line [whose] indispensable music fuses his implacable understanding of words with their own shadows." His debut novel Ours, published by Viking Books, was released on February 20, 2024.

Awards Thief in the Interior was the winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. In 2017 Williams was awarded a Whiting Award for Poetry.

MUTINY was the winner of the 2022 American Book Award, finalist for both the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and Publishing Triangle’s 2022 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.