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Michael Phillips is a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He has covered the U.S. ground war in Afghanistan since 2001, embedding with American forces in the field on two-dozen occasions. He rode with a front-line Marine infantry squad from Kuwait to Baghdad during the 2003 Iraq invasion and returned to cover the same battalion four other times between 2003 and 2006. When not in Afghanistan, he writes about the aftermath of the wars, including post-traumatic stress, suicide and other issues facing veterans and military families. He has covered the global financial crisis, international economics, sub-Saharan Africa, Third World development, foreign assistance and AIDS.
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He is the author of a book, The Gift of Valor (Broadway Books, 2005), about the life and death of Corporal Jason Dunham, the first Marine to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War.
In 2011, Mr. Phillips was a finalist for Pulitzer Prize for his feature coverage of the war in Afghanistan. In 2013, his writing about Afghanistan and the war’s aftermath at home won the Ernie Pyle prize from the Scripps Howard Foundation and New York Press Club and Washington DC Society of Professional Journalists feature-writing awards. His first-person account of a suicide bombing in Afghanistan received the 2013 Major Megan McClung Award from the Marine Corps Heritage
Foundation. In 2011, he won a National Press Club award for telling the story of a bomb-sniffing yellow lab who couldn’t handle the stress of combat in Afghanistan. His 2009 “Broken Homes” series on the housing crisis won feature-writing prizes from the SPJ Deadline Club and the New York Newspaper Publishers Association. In 2007, Mr. Phillips won the National Association of Black Journalists award for his coverage of sub-Saharan Africa. His coverage of Afghanistan and war’s after-
effects has made him a finalist for the American Society of Newspaper Editors Batten Medal (2013), the Dart Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma (2013), the Michael Kelly Award (2013), the Texas Observer MOLLY Prize (2013), the SPJ Deadline Club Award (2013), the Ernie Pyle prize (2009), the beat-reporting prize of the SPJ’s New York City Chapter (2009), and the ASNE award in the short, distinguished writing category (2002). His photographs of a suicide attack in Afghanistan took second place in the spot-news category in the National Headliner Awards (2013).
Mr. Phillips joined Dow Jones in January 1995 as a reporter for the Dow Jones Emerging Markets Report newswire, based in Washington, D.C. He became a reporter in the Journal’s Washington news bureau in June 1996.
In the fall of 1986, Mr. Phillips began his journalism career as a free-lance reporter for the New York Times’ New Jersey section in the Sunday edition. For several months in late 1987 he was a reporter for United Press International in Boston, before becoming a free-lance reporter in Dakar, Senegal, in 1988. He joined States
News Service during the fall of 1988 as a reporter, and from Washington, D.C., he covered regional news first for New Jersey and later for Minnesota and Florida. In 1991 he became a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press in Madrid and was dispatched to cover conflicts in Somalia and Angola.
Born in Minneapolis, Minn., Mr. Phillips received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and a master’s degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs of Princeton University. While at Princeton, he was a reporting intern for UPI in Nairobi, Kenya.
