Carl Phillips, an English and African-American studies professor at Washington University, has been selected as a finalist for the National Book Award for his work, “Speak Low,” published in 2009. He has received two prior nominations for the award and progressed to the level of finalist, for “From the Devotions” and “The Rest of Love: Poems,” for which Phillips also won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry.