I've published my PhD dissertation and got my PhD recently. Can I rewrite my PhD dissertation for publication in a journal article?

And in the process of doing so, can I simply recycle(re-use word per word) sentences from my PhD thesis, or do I have to rephrase everything to avoid self-plagiarism?

I would think you would be able to get more than one article out of your PhD, and yes you can publish from your dissertation. You would be reformatting and condensing parts of your dissertation to make this suitable for an article but not necessarily rewriting all of your content. Not many people are likely to read your PhD. However, the journal articles would have a broader audience.

Some people convert PhDs into books, and again they would change aspects of the PhD to make it suitable for a different audience and more readable-but the book would still be largely the PhD, in a more accessible and reader friendly format.

You can condense your thesis into a journal article for publication. However, you cannot copy the content from the thesis word for word. The relevant sections need to be re-written to avoid plagiarism.

Aspire, this is a topic where it can be easy to be lost in the 'grey'. So I have included a short excerpt from another source that outlines fairly succinctly what you can and can't do when converting an article.

"Additionally, a thesis and a journal article are completely different in terms of overall approach and format. To convert a thesis/dissertation into a journal article, it has to be rewritten and refined. More often, a journal article is crafted based on an excerpt or a chapter of a thesis, and sometimes, multiple articles can be published based on different thesis chapters. The journal article undergoes further revisions during peer review, which makes it substantially different from the thesis, thus solving the problem of duplication. Charges of self-plagiarism can be avoided by citing the thesis/dissertation in the journal paper, and using block quotes wherever content has been copied verbatim.
\Most importantly, you should inform the editor at the time of submission that your article is based on your thesis, mention when and where it has been published, and state your willingness to provide a copy if required."(Editage Insights).