Phillis Levin is the author of three previous books of poetry, as well as the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, The New Criterion, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Her honors include the Norma Farber First Book Award, Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and a 2007 NEA Fellowship. She lives in New York, is a professor of English and poet-in-residence at Hofstra University, and also teaches in the graduate creative writing program at New York University.

All the poems by Phillis Levin that have appeared on Verse Daily:
January 23, 2008:   "On Betrayal" "The Woman Who Is And a voice came to me and said..."
October 7, 2006:   "Conversation Between Clouds" " It's different every time, but there was one..."
October 13, 2005:   "Always The Same Face" " Full moon. Harvest moon. Late September...."

Books by Phillis Levin: May Day, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet , Mercury, The Afterimage, Temples and Fields

Other poems on the web by Phillis Levin:
"End of April"
Three poems
"On Time"
Two poems
"A Rhinoceros at the Prague Zoo"

About May Day:

"Phillis Levin's poems shimmer with gracefulness. By this I mean they sing, with eloquent restraint, as though 'there is no other way to say this.' But I also mean to identify that primal relationship between grace and the mysteries—for the perfectly voiced poems of May Day situate us, time and again, on the line between articulation and erasure, security and peril, real clarity and the ancient sublime. I know of no other contemporary American poet whose style of secular poetry verges so convincingly on the holy. Levin's abiding restraint reminds us again: A whisper allows us to hear the most sound."
—David Baker

"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. May Day is a book of severe clarity and authority."
—Rosanna Warren

"Lyrical, metaphysical, tender, and fierce, Phillis Levin's May Day delights and astonishes. Her use of Greek myth to illuminate contemporary violence and disgust summons up both tears and deep thought about our present and future."
—Martha Nussbaum