Larry Levis was raised in Selma, a small agricultural town in central California. His father was a grape grower, and Levis, the fourth and youngest child, grew up helping out with the vineyard. This upbringing is explored in his poetry, where Selma’s landscapes, migrant workers, and provinciality are frequent subject matter. Levis came to poetry as a junior in high school after reading T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Frost and deciding to attempt a poem of his own. He studied with Philip Levine at Fresno State University, developing a mentoring relationship with the elder poet that grew into a close friendship and correspondence of three decades. He received his MA from Syracuse University, where he studied under Donald Justice, and his PhD from the University of Iowa.
Levis’ first book, Wrecking Crew, won the 1971 U.S. Award of the International Poetry Forum. His second book, The Afterlife, won the 1976 Lamont Award, and his third, The Dollmaker's Ghost, was selected by Stanley Kunitz as the winner of the 1981 National Poetry Series’ Open Competition. He is also the author of Winter Stars (1985) and The Widening Spell of the Leaves (1991). His poems have been widely anthologized. Always original, his poetic voice developed greatly over his writing career, moving from brief imagistic poems to longer, surrealism-inflected works with what David Biespiel calls “a narrative delicacy that lets him widen stories across time, allowing them to accrue and swell until he suddenly stitches together the roving metaphors.”
Levis was a Fulbright Lecturer in Yugoslavia and the recipient of a YM-YWHA Discovery award, three NEA fellowships, and a Guggenheim fellowship. He was co-editor of Missouri Review from 1977 to 1980. He married three times, to Barbara Campell, the poet Marcia Southwick, and Mary Jane Hale; all three relationships ended in divorce. He taught at the University of Missouri; the University of Utah, where he directed the creative writing program; and Warren Wilson College. His last teaching position was at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), where he was a professor of English and Senior Poet.
Levis died of a heart attack in 1996, but his influence as a one-of-a-kind poetic talent continues. VCU awards the Levis Reading Prize to a first or second poetry book each year in his honor, and he was the subject of the documentary film A Late Style of Fire (2016). Three of his books have been posthumously published—Elegy (1997), The Selected Levis (2000), and The Darkening Trapeze (2016)—and a fourth, Swirl & Vortex, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2026.
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More Larry Levis
Text: Read poems by Levis at the Academy of American Poets
Video: Levis reads with Philip Levine for the Fresno Poets' Association in 1984
Text: Devin Kelly discusses Levis and his poem "Prayer" in Ordinary Plots