Phillip Barron

Phillip Barron is an American poet and philosopher who teaches at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.[1] His poetry has won the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award[2] for philosophical literature and has been featured in many national journals including The Brooklyn Rail,[3] New American Writing,[4] and Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts.[5] As of 2020, Barron is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Connecticut.[6]

What Comes from a Thing has been described by reviewers as "a masterpiece of phenomenological description in which poetry is not application or a technique for profundity but instead at the heart of philosophical/poetic evocation"[7] and as "laments of postindustrial despair, isolation, and ecological ruin."[8] Through both poetry and philosophy, Barron challenges traditional conceptions of personal identity, reframing identity as a distributed phenomenon "that comes through the tension between the artificial and the untouched."[9][10]

He was the founding editor of the poetry journal OccuPoetry, an online literary journal which documented poetry and art of the Occupy Movement.[11] He is a member of the Community of Writers poetry workshop, and he edited the 2012 issue of the Squaw Valley Review.[12]

Barron has been cited as an expert on sexism and capital punishment[13][14][15] for a 2000 article titled "Gender Discrimination in the US Death Penalty System".[16] In 2013, he appeared on a HuffPost Live segment on gender discrimination in the death penalty.[17]