About & Contact

Lynn Levin is a poet, writer, and the author of nine books. Her five poetry collections include The Minor Virtues, Miss Plastique, Fair Creatures of an Hour, Imaginarium, and A Few Questions about Paradise. She is co-author of Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets and translator, from the Spanish, of Odi Gonzales’s Birds on the Kiswar Tree. Her debut story collection, House Parties (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023), was named a best book of summer by Philadelphia Magazine, and Foreword Reviews called it wry and tragicomic.

Levin brings a poet’s touch to her work in progress, a book of linked short stories centering on the lives of people in Middlehampton, Pennsylvania, a fictional suburb of her own invention, where the ordinary is more than ordinary–it is reliably profound, funny, and even strange.

Levin’s poems, stories, and essays appear in Ploughshares, Boulevard, The Hopkins Review, Rattle, Michigan Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, Scientific American, The Saturday Evening Post, and on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. Her essay “How to Eat a Pet” was named a Notable Essay in Best American Essays, and her short story “Tell Us about Your Experience” won first prize in the Bucks County Short Fiction Contest. Her poem “If You Are Reading This” was selected for Jenny Holzer’s permanent installation For Philadelphia. A former Bucks County poet laureate, she has received nearly a score of Pushcart Prize nominations.

Levin has made more than 400 public appearances at workshops, reading series, book clubs, conference panels, and other events, and was twice a guest on NPR’s Radio Times with host Marty Moss-Coane. She teaches English and creative writing at Drexel University, where she received the Adjunct Award for Teaching Excellence, and taught for over a decade at the University of Pennsylvania.

Levin was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and holds a BA in comparative literature from Northwestern University and an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.