Phillis Levin
Professor of English Emerita, Hofstra University
Biography
Phillis Levin is the author of six books of poetry, most recently An Anthology of Rain (Barrow Street Press, 2025). Her previous collection, Mr. Memory & Other Poems (Penguin Books, 2016), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English (2001). From 1985 to 1997, she was an editor of Boulevard. Her honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar Award to Slovenia, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Trust of Amy Lowell. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The Atlantic, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, PN Review, Poetry London, The Poetry Review, Raritan, and The Yale Review. She lives in New York.
Published Works
Poetry Collections
An Anthology of Rain (Barrow Street, 2025)
Mr. Memory & Other Poems (Penguin, 2016)
May Day (Penguin, 2008)
Mercury (Penguin, 2001)
The Afterimage (Cooper Beech, 1995)
Temples and Fields (University of Georgia, 1988)
Edited Anthologies
The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English (Penguin, 2001)
Links to Sample Works
Languages of Publication(s) and Poets Translated
Anglo-Saxon; the Spanish of Francisco de Quevedo. Collaboratively with the original poets: the Hungarian of István Vörös; the Polish of Agata Tuszyńska; the Slovenian of Tomaž Šalaman.Subject Matter
Art & Ekphrasis, Childhood, Death, Eastern Europe, Environment & Climate Crisis, Friendship, Grief & Elegy, History, Loss, Love, Marriage, Mythology, Nature, Torah, War, Other, Math and/or Physics, Visual Art, Translation, Intimacy.Profile created by Jonathan Schneiderman.
