Phillis Levin

Phillis Levin was born in 1954 in Paterson, New Jersey. She began writing at an early age and received a BA in poetry, philosophy, and psychology from Sarah Lawrence College in 1976. She went on to receive an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University in 1977.

Levin’s first book, Temples and Fields (University of Georgia Press, 1988), was awarded the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. She is the author of five other poetry collections: An Anthology of Rain (Barrow Street Press, 2025); Mr. Memory & Other Poems (Penguin, 2016); May Day (Penguin, 2008); Mercury (Penguin, 2001); and The Afterimage (Copper Beech Press, 1995).

Levin also edited The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English (Penguin, 2001), which Kimiko Hahn calls “one of my desert-island books!” 

Rosanna Warren notes, “Phillis Levin’s poems are both hot and cool—at once molten glass and shaped crystalline structure. With her abstracting and philosophical intelligence, she muses on patterns of passion and loss; with her heart, she makes us feel them.”

Levin has been the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 1989, Levin became an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she taught through 2001. She has also taught creative writing at the 92NY, New York University, The New School, and Hofstra University, where she served as poet in residence and is now a professor emerita of English. She lives in New York City.