Jan Heller Levi

Poet Jan Heller Levi was born in New York City and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. She earned a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and is the author of the poetry collections Once I Gazed at You in Wonder (1999), which received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets; Skyspeak: Poems (2005); and That’s the Way to Travel (2019). Conversational and intimate, Levi’s poems often address familial concerns and aspects of a woman’s life. Levi also co-edited The Essential June Jordan (2021). Alice Fulton noted of Once I Gazed at You in Wonder that “the book’s tone modulates from elegiac to self-mockery, reticent to funny, as Levi considers not only grief and love, but the unbidden, bereft emotions in between.”

Levi teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College. She is married to the writer Christoph Keller and divides her time between St. Gallen, Switzerland, and New York City.