He is the director of the nonfiction graduate program at Columbia University, where he also teaches writing. After working with children for 12 years as a writer in the schools, he taught creative writing and literature at Fordham, Cooper Union, University of Houston, Hofstra University, New York University, and Bennington College.

His anthology, Writing New York, received a citation from the New York Society Library and honorable mention from the Municipal Art Society’s Brendan Gill Award. He received a Christopher Medal for Being with Children, a Texas Institute of Letters award in the best nonfiction book of the year category for Bachelorhood, and was a finalist for the PEN best essay book of the year award for Portrait of My Body. /rebates/2fThe-Rug-Merchant-Phillip-Lopate2fbook2f5829280&. He 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.

His two most recent publications are Portrait Inside My Head (personal essays) and To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction (2013). He has written three personal essay collections, Bachelorhood (1981), Against Joie de Vivre (1989), and Portrait of My Body (1996) two novels, Confessions of Summer (1979) and The Rug Merchant (1987) a pair of novellas, Two Marriages (2008) three poetry collections, The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open (1972), The Daily Round (1976), and At the End of the Day (2010) a memoir of his teaching experiences, Being with Children (1975) a collection of his movie criticisms, Totally Tenderly Tragically (1998) an urbanist meditation, Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (2004) a critical study, Notes on Sontag (2009) a biographical monograph, Rudy Burckhardt: Photographer and Filmmaker (2004), and the Phillip Lopate reader, Getting Personal: Selected Writings (2003). A native of Brooklyn, Phillip Lopate received a BA from Columbia in 1964 and a doctorate from the Union Graduate School in 1979.

The Rug Merchant by Phillip Lopate