Philip Levine was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1928. He is the author of sixteen books of poetry, most recently The Mercy (1998). His books have received many awards, including the National Book Award in both 1976 for Ashes: Poems New and Old and in 1991 for What Work Is, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth. He has also 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). Levine has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize from Poetry, the Frank O'Hara Prize, and two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowships. For two years he served as chair of the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, and he was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000.  

Photo by Frances Levine