Philip Levine

Philip Levine was born in 1928 in Detroit, Michigan. He wrote numerous books of poetry, including Breath (2004). Names of the Lost (1975), 7 Years From Somewhere (1979), Ashes: Poems New and Old (1979), New Selected Poems (1991), What Work Is (1991), The Simple Truth (1994), and The Mercy (1999). In addition, Levine 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). He recieved a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize from Poetry, the Frank O’Hara Prize, and two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships. He served as chair of the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, the 2000 Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, and the 2011 United States Poet Laureate.