Phillis Levin was born and raised in Paterson, New Jersey, and educated at Sarah Lawrence College and The Johns Hopkins University. From 1989 to 2001 she was a full-time member of the creative writing faculty at The University of Maryland, College Park; she has also taught workshops and seminars at The Unterberg Poetry Center of The 92nd Street Y, and in the graduate creative writing programs at The New School and at New York University. From 2003 to 2008 she was an Elector of the American Poets’ Corner of The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York, and since 1998 has directed the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize. Phillis Levin served as Guest Poetry Co-editor for the 2009 Pushcart Prize XXXIII Best of the Small Presses. She is currently a professor of English and the Poet-in-Residence at Hofstra University.
Phillis Levin is the author of four volumes of poetry, Temples and Fields (1988), The Afterimage (1995), Mercury (2001), and May Day (2008). She is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet (2001). Her poems have appeared in such journals as The New Yorker, Grand Street, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Nation, Agni, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Literary Imagination, The Kenyon Review, PN Review, and Poetry London, and have been published in a broad range of anthologies, including Poetry 180, Poems of New York, The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, and three editions of The Best American Poetry (1989, 1998, and 2009). She was a guest on the BBC Radio 4 program “In Our Time.” Her poem “May Day” was featured by Garrison Keillor on “The Writer’s Almanac,” National Public Radio. Translations of her poems have been published in Argentina, Peru, Slovenia, Poland, Hungary, Israel, and China.
Her many honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award for 1988, fellowships to The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and The Liguria Study Center in Bogliasco, Italy, and the 2006 Richard Hugo Prize from Poetry Northwest. She is the recipient of a 1986 Ingram Merrill Grant, a 1995 Fulbright Scholar Award to Slovenia, the 1999 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a 2003 Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.
Phillis Levin has given readings at numerous universities and cultural centers in the United States and abroad, and has lectured widely on the craft of poetry. About her most recent volume, poetry editor David Baker of The Kenyon Review has written: “the perfectly voiced poems of May Day situate us, time and again, on the line between articulation and erasure, security and peril, real clarity and the ancient sublime. I know of no other contemporary American poet whose style of secular poetry verges so convincingly on the holy.”
