The Heart of a Black Man
Phillips didn’t set out to become an author. But when you’ve been born in Kenya, raised in a San Diego immigrant neighborhood, deployed to a combat zone, built a career in corporate finance, and raised five kids on your own, you accumulate a story worth telling. His writing is a direct extension of what he does in every other area of his life–helping people see what’s possible and why it matters.
He contributed to The Heart of a Black Man alongside 29 other Black men, each bringing firsthand accounts of adversity and triumph that don’t get told often enough, or honestly enough, in mainstream publishing.
Compilation Book Author
Phillips has co-authored two books, each distinct in form but connected by a common thread: the interior lives of Black men, rendered honestly.
The Heart of a Black Man: Inspiring Stories of Triumph and Resilience is an anthology written because Black men have stories worth hearing. The book pulls together personal accounts from Black men across the United States and from cities including London, Jamaica, and the Bahamas. Each story tells the realities of systemic racism, discrimination, and adversity, and each one a testament to what it looks like to push through anyway. It’s not a book about victimhood, but resilience, told by the people who lived it.
If Only for One Night: What If You Could Have, One… More… Night? is a fiction co-authorship centered on two men whose lives are more tangled than either of them realizes. Jeffrey McDaniel has built a comfortable life, with a successful career, and a beautiful wife, but he’s never fully let go of his first love. When she reappears, he has a decision to make.
Lawrence Peterson has always seemed to have it all figured out, until a chance encounter at his reunion proves otherwise. The problem: the woman Lawrence can’t stop thinking about is Jeffrey’s wife. The book explores desire, loyalty, and the emotional lives of men in ways that fiction doesn’t always make room for.
The Black Male Experience
Phillips writes and speaks on the Black male experience. Born in Kenya, raised in a San Diego immigrant community, shaped by military combat, corporate boardrooms, and single fatherhood, his life encompasses a range of experiences that rarely get told together, let alone honestly.
That’s exactly why he does it.
“Too many times we look for the government, we look for a celebrity or an athlete to do things where the greatest innovations and the greatest changes and the greatest impact would come from regular, everyday people.”
His authorship is advocacy. It’s a commitment to making sure the triumphs and the struggles of Black men are documented, visible, and impossible to overlook.