Philip Levine was born in 1928 in Detroit, Michigan. He is the author of sixteen books of poetry, most recently Breath (2004). His other poetry collections include Names of the Lost (1975), 7 Years From Somewhere (1979), Ashes: Poems New and Old (1979), New Selected Poems (1991), What Work Is (1991), The Simple Truth (1994), and The Mercy (1999). In addition, Levine has 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). The recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Levine has also been honored with the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize from Poetry, the Frank O'Hara Prize, and two Guggenheim 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. He lives in New York City and Fresno, California, and teaches at New York University.