Phillis Levin is the author of six poetry collections: An Anthology of Rain (Barrow Street Press, 2025); Mr. Memory & Other Poems (Penguin Books, 2016), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and named by Library Journal one of the Top Picks in Poetry; May Day (Penguin Books, 2008); Mercury (Penguin Books, 2001); The Afterimage (Copper Beech Press, 1995); and Temples and Fields (University of Georgia Press, 1988), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. She is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English (Penguin USA; Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 2001).
Levin’s other honors include a Fulbright Scholar Award to Slovenia, an Ingram Merrill Grant, the Richard Hugo Prize from Poetry Northwest, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Trust of Amy Lowell. She has been a Fellow at Bread Loaf and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and has been awarded artist residencies to the American Academy in Rome, Bogliasco, MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. Her poems appear in AGNI, The Atlantic, The Common, Grand Street, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Nation, The New Criterion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Plume, PN Review, Poetry, Poem-a-Day (Academy of American Poets), Poetry London, The Poetry Review (UK), Raritan, Southwest Review, TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.
Widely anthologized, her work has been published in three editions of The Best American Poetry and in Poetry 180 (Billy Collins, editor), Poets for Life: 76 Poets Respond to AIDS (Michael Klein, editor), The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (Kevin Young, editor), Poems of New York (Elizabeth Schmidt, editor), and A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker: 1925-2025 (Kevin Young, editor). “Four Tesserae," from her memoir-in-progress, was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2015. Natasha Trethewey featured “Gulf” (from Mr. Memory & Other Poems) for her weekly column published in The New York Times Sunday Magazine in 2016. “Part” (from Mercury) was featured on The Slowdown, a podcast hosted by Major Jackson, in 2023.
Levin has given readings at numerous venues in the U.S. and abroad, including the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the Ledbury Poetry Festival, Vilenica International Literary Festival in Slovenia, the International Artists’ Museum in Poland, the British Library in Florence, Amherst College, Phillips Exeter Academy, Boston University, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the University of Mississippi, Oxford University (UK), The New School, Elliott Bay Book Company, Vanderbilt University, The KGB Bar in New York, The GRV in Edinburgh, Foyles Bookshop, Kings Place in London, and The Poetry Society in London.
Translations of her poems have been published in Argentina, Czechia, Israel, Peru, Poland, and Slovenia. She collaborated with Tomaž Šalamun on translating many of his poems from Slovene into English. From 1985-1997 she was an editor of Boulevard. Levin was invited to London to speak on the BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time, hosted by Melvyn Bragg and produced by Charlie Taylor, for a Conversation on the Sonnet with Jonathan Bate and Frank Kermode in 2001. She served as an Elector (2003-08) of the American Poets’ Corner of The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York.
Born and raised in Paterson, NJ, Levin earned degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She was a full-time member of the creative writing faculty at The University of Maryland (1989-2001); taught poetry workshops and craft seminars at The Unterberg Poetry Center (1993-2006); and was a visiting professor in the graduate writing program at New York University (2001-07). Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English emerita at Hofstra University, Levin lives with her husband in New York City and West Cornwall, CT.
