Phil Hall was raised in the Kawartha Lakes region of Ontario. He attended the University of Windsor. He has taught writing at York University, Ryerson Polytechnical University, Sage Hill Writing Experience, The Toronto New School, and the Banff Centre for the Arts. He has been writer-in-residence at the Berton House in Dawson City, Queen's University, the University of Windsor, the University of Ottawa, and the University of New Brunswick. For Killdeer (2011) Hall won both the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry in English and Ontario's Trillium Prize. He has twice been nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize.