Patrick Phillips is professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. He is the author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W. W. Norton, 2016), which tells how his homeplace of Forsyth County, Georgia, was transformed in the fall of 1912, when mobs of local white men attacked and violently drove out their African American neighbors, creating a “whites-only” zone that would last for nearly a century. Blood at the Root was a finalist for the PEN Galbraith Award, the ALA Carnegie Medal, and the BN Discover Prize, and was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Smithsonian.
Among Phillips’s other honors are Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright grants, the Lyric Poetry Award of the Poetry Society of America, and a fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Phillips has also published four books of poems, including Elegy for a Broken Machine (Knopf, 2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Song of the Closing Doors (Knopf, August 2022).
His project, “The Kellogg Place: American Wealth in Black and White,” will study the history of Jim Crow-era land theft, which so often followed in the wake of mob attacks, as “abandoned” African American properties were slowly but inexorably transferred to local whites. The project will show just how profoundly racial land theft continues to affect Black and white lives — and just how closely America’s racial wealth gap is tied to the land beneath our feet.
