Dana Levin

Dana Levin was raised in Lancaster, California. She received a BA from Pitzer College in 1987 and an MFA from New York University in 1992.

Levin is the author of Now Do You Know Where You Are (Copper Canyon Press, 2022); Banana Palace (Copper Canyon Press, 2016); Sky Burial (Copper Canyon Press, 2011); Wedding Day (Copper Canyon Press, 2005); and In the Surgical Theatre (Copper Canyon Press, 1999), which was selected by Louise Glück to receive the APR/Honickman First Book Prize.

About Levin’s debut, In the Surgical Theatre, which also received the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, Glück writes, “Sensuous, compassionate, violent, extravagant: what an amazing debut this is, a book of terrors and marvels.”

In an interview with The Kenyon Review, Levin says, “I’ve come to see that I compose many poems as dramas, enactions. Therefore, pace and volume must be attended to, for essentially I am trying to render the sound of feeling (and/or the pace of thinking).”

Levin has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation, among others.

Levin has taught at the University of New Mexico, Santa Fe University of Art and Design, and the College of Santa Fe. Levin was the Guest Editor for Poem-a-Day in March 2020, and currently serves as a distinguished writer in residence at Maryville University. She lives in St. Louis.