a new African-American voice in gay and lesbian
writing. Phillips goes beyond his classical roots to
address gender, race, and moral issues, avoiding
polemic and writing the unexpected. His collec-
tion In the Blood is marked by reticence and con-
trol underscored passion and dreamlike lyrics in a
delicate balance.
Before Phillips began publishing, he was
awarded the George Starbuck Fellowship from
Boston University (given to the graduate student
considered the best writer) and a cash award from
the Massachusetts Artist Foundation. In 1992 he
won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize for his
first work, In the Blood. In 2000 he won the Lambda
Literary Award for Pastoral, and in 2001 the Kings-
ley Tufts Poetry Award for The Tether. He has also
received an Award in Literature from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fel-
lowship, the Witter Bynner Foundation Fellowship
from the Library of Congress, two Pushcart Prizes,
and an Academy of American Poets prize. Phillips
directs the creative writing program at Washing-
ton University in St. Louis.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“Carl Phillips.” Washington University News and In-
formation. February 2004. Washington University,
St. Louis. Available online. URL: http://news-info.
wustl.edu/sb/page/normal/143.html. Accessed
May 11, 2007.
Georges, Cynthia. “Phillips’ career is poetry in mo-
tion.” Record. May 1, 1997. Washington Univer-
sity, St. Louis. Available online. URL: http://wupa.
wustl.edu/record/archive/1997/05-01-1997/3416.
html. Accessed May 11, 2007.
Phillips, Carl. In the Blood. Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 1992.
Kim Hai Pearson
Brian Jennings
Plumpp, Sterling (1940– )
Legendary as a poet, teacher, and scholar, Sterling
Plumpp worked in the cotton fields and cornfields
of rural Mississippi, where his maternal grandfa-
ther was a sharecropper, during his early youth
until an aunt sponsored his education, allowing
him to attend Holy Ghost High School in Jackson,
Mississippi. With a small scholarship to St. Bene-
dict’s College in Atchinson, Kansas, Plumpp began
his college education but left two years later for
Chicago, where he worked in the post office and
briefly, served in the U.S. Army. Plumpp eventually
earned his B.A. (1968) and M.A. (1971) degrees in
psychology from Chicago’s Roosevelt University.
Plumpp, who served on the editorial staff of
HAKI MADHUBUTI’s Black Books Bulleting and pub-
lished his first poems in HOYT FULLER’s The Negro
Digest (BLACK WORLD), is the author of 14 books
of poetry. Plumpp is internationally known for his
use of BLUES and jazz, which contextually and struc-
turally center his collected work, including Portable
Soul (1969), Half Black, Half Blacker (1970), Black
Rituals (1972), The Mojo Hands Call (1982), Or-
nate with Smoke (1988), Blues: The Story Always
Untold (1989), Johannesburg and Other Poems
(1993), Hornman (1995), and Blues Narratives
(1999). Staccato, fractured lines and discursive, in-
terrupted narratives in his poems parallel the form
and rhythm of the blues, suggesting the socially
constructed obstacles to wholeness that the blues
often explore. In other words, for this Mississippi
native son, the blues are defiantly personal. “When
a bluesman sings,” Plumpp announces, “ It / is my
history and / it / is my autobiography,” since the
blues is “Celebration from / denial’s mouth.”
Plumpp has received several awards, includ-
ing the Richard Wright Literacy Excellence Award,
the Carl Sandburg Literary Award for poetry,
and three Illinois Arts Council Awards. In 2001
Plumpp retired from the University of Illinois at
Chicago, where he had taught in the English and
African-American studies departments for nearly
three decades.BIBLIOGRAPPHY
Collins, Michael. “Sterling Plumpp.” In The Oxford
Companion to African-American Literature, edited
by William Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and
Trudier Harris, 583–584. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1997.Lynda Koolish416 Plumpp, Sterling