Phillip Lopate

Phillip Lopate (born November 16, 1943) is an American film critic, essayist, fiction writer, poet, and teacher.

Early life
Phillip Lopate was born in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated with a BA degree from Columbia University in 1964 and received his doctorate from Union Institute & University in 1979. Lopate is the younger brother of radio host Leonard Lopate.

Teaching
Lopate worked as a writer-in-the-schools for twelve years and his memoir Being With Children came out of his association with the artists-in-the-school organization Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Lopate coordinated T&W's first project (at Manhattan's P.S. 75), the model for which led to similar programs in all 50 states.

He has taught creative writing and literature to undergraduate and graduate students at several institutions, including Bennington College, Fordham University, Cooper Union, the University of Houston, New York University (NYU), Columbia University School of the Arts, and The New School. He is currently professor of Writing at Columbia University. He held the Adams Chair at Hofstra University until 2011, where he was professor of English. He retired from Columbia University in 2023.

Creative writing
Lopate's essays, fiction, and poetry have appeared in several Pushcart Prize annuals, the anthologies Congregation and Testimony, and The Paris Review, Harper's Magazine, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Harvard Educational Review, The New York Times Book Review, Boulevard, The Journal of Contemporary Fiction, Double Take, and Creative Nonfiction, among others.

Travel
Lopate has written for the New York Times Sophisticated Traveler, Conde Nast Traveler, European Travel and Life, Sidestreets of the World, and American Way.

Architecture
Lopate has written about architecture and urbanism for Metropolis, The New York Times, Double Take, Preservation, Cite, and 7 Days, where he wrote a bimonthly architectural column. He has served as a committee member for the Municipal Art Society and as a consultant for Ric Burns' PBS documentary on the history of New York City.

Media critic
He has written about movies for The New York Times, Vogue, Esquire, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, Cinemabook, Threepenny Review, Tikkun, American Film, The Normal School, and the anthology The Movie That Changed My Life, among others. A volume of his selected movie criticism, Totally Tenderly Tragically, was published by Doubleday-Anchor in 1998. He edited a massive anthology of American film criticism from the silent era to present day, entitled American Movie Critics: From Silents Until Now, was published in March 2006 for Library of America.

Awards and fellowships
Lopate has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He also received a Christopher Medal for Being With Children, the Texas Institute of Letters award for best non-fiction book of the year (for Bachelorhood), and was a finalist for the Spielvogel-Diamonstein PEN Award for best essay book of the year (for Portrait of My Body). His anthology Writing New York received an honorable mention from the Municipal Art Society's Brendan Gill Award, and a citation from the New York Society Library. He was also a Lila Wallace Foundation writer-in-residence. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.