Phillip Levine was born in Detroit, Michigan, Michigan, in 1928. He is the author of sixteen books
of poetry, most recently Breath (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). His other poetry collections include The Mercy (1999); The Simple
Truth (1994), which won the Pulitzer Prize; What Work Is (1991), which won the National Book Award; New Selected Poems (1991);
Ashes: Poems New and Old (1979), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the first American Book Award for
Poetry; 7 Years From Somewhere (1979), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Names of the Lost (1975),
which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.
In a review
of Breath, Levine's most recent collection, Publishers Weekly wrote: "Levine writes gritty, fiercely unpretentious
free verse about American manliness, physical labor, simple pleasures and profound grief, often set in working-class Detroit
(where Levine grew up) or in central California (where he now resides), sometimes tinged with reference to his Jewish heritage
or to the Spanish poets of rapt simplicity (Machado, Lorca) who remain his most visible influence."
Levine
has also published a collection of essays, The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography (1994), edited The Essential Keats (1987),
and co-edited and translated two books: Off the Map: Selected Poems of Gloria Fuertes (with Ada Long, 1984) and Tarumba: The
Selected Poems of Jaime Sabines (with Ernesto Trejo, 1979).
Levine has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the
Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize from Poetry, the Frank O'Hara Prize, and two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships. For two
years he served as chair of the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, and he was elected a Chancellor of
The Academy of American Poets in 2000. He lives in New York City and Fresno, California, and teaches at New York University
University.
