Dana Levin
Dana Levin is a significant voice in contemporary American poetry, recognized for her visionary intensity, syntactic ambition, and willingness to engage the largest questions — about mortality, consciousness, the natural world, and the fate of civilization — with both philosophical rigor and lyric abandon. She grew up in the Mojave Desert of California and studied at Pitzer College and New York University. Her background spans mythology, Jungian psychology, and the Western mystical traditions, all of which surface in her densely layered and deeply imagined poems.
Her debut collection, In the Surgical Theatre (1999), selected by Louise Glück for the American Poetry Review/Honickman Prize, announced her as a poet of extraordinary ambition and strange beauty. The book’s engagement with the body, illness, and transformation through a mythological lens set it apart from much contemporary first-book poetry. Subsequent collections — Wedding Day (2005), Sky Burial (2011), and Banana Palace (2016) — extended her characteristic blend of ecological consciousness, eschatological imagination, and formally daring long lines. Her most recent collection, Now Do You Know Where You Are (2022), received widespread praise for its reckoning with mortality, environmental collapse, and the possibility of spiritual renewal, cementing her reputation as one of the indispensable poets of her generation.
Levin’s work has been recognized with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation, as well as residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and many other journals and anthologies. She is widely anthologized and taught in graduate creative writing programs across the country.
Levin is a professor of creative writing and has taught at institutions including Santa Fe University of Art and Design and Washington University in St. Louis. She is known as a generous teacher and mentor, and her influence on younger poets who are drawn to mystical and ecological themes in poetry is considerable. Her work occupies a singular position in American poetry — simultaneously visionary and grounded, cosmic and intimately personal.