August 10th, 2011
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington appointed Philip Levine as the Library’s 18th Poet Laureate for 2011-2012. Levine’s duties will begin with a reading of his work at the Coolidge Auditorium on Monday, Oct. 17.
Levine succeeds W.S. Merwin and joins a pool of distinguished poets who have served in the position, including Robert Penn Warren, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Stanley Kunitz, Mark Strand, Howard Nemerov; and more recently Kay Ryan, Charles Simic, Donald Hall, Ted Kooser, Louise Glück, Billy Collins, Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass and Rita Dove.
Levine is the author of 20 collections of poems, including most recently “News of the World” (2009). He won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for “The Simple Truth,” the National Book Award in 1991 for “What Work Is” and in 1980 for “Ashes: Poems New and Old,” the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1979 for both “Ashes: Poems New and Old” and “7 Years From Somewhere,” and the 1975 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for “Names of the Lost.”
