Leila Philip

Leila Philip is the author of four books, including The Road Through Miyama, (Random House 1989, Vintage 1991) for which she received the 1990 / PEN Martha Albrand Special Citation for Nonfiction; and the award-winning memoir A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family (Viking 2001, Vintage 2002, SUNY 2009). Philip has received numerous awards for her writing, including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and The National Endowment for the Humanities. Her essays have been widely anthologized. Fluent in Japanese, she writes on Japan as well as about art for a variety of venues including Art in America and Art Critical. Her most recent book Water Rising is gaining attention as a unique art collaboration which combines 11 of Philip’s poems with 12 watercolors by the visual artist, Garth Evans. 

Philip studied poetry at Princeton University, where she majored in Comparative Literature, graduating cum laude with a Fifth year degree in East Asian Studies. After working for several years as a journalist, she went on to earn an MFA at Columbia University as the Woolrich Fellow in Fiction.

Leila Philip is an Associate Professor in the English department at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, and is a contributor to the Boston Globe.