Dana Levin

Dana Levin is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Banana Palace (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). Her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was chosen by Louise Glück for the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. Her other collections are Wedding Day (2005) and Sky Burial (2011). She has received fellowships from the NEA, PEN, and the Witter Bynner, Whiting, and Guggenheim foundations. A teacher of poetry for over 25 years, she currently serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis.

Her fifth collection, Now Do You Know Where You Are, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in spring 2022.

The Value of Support

"The Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award came at a crucial moment in my writing life: while trying to finish a second book. It offered me encouragement when I doubted; it offered me the resources to reduce my job duties for a time, which were expanding, so I could write. The Award said to me: Keep going, don’t put your creative life last! Women so often put personal creativity last; the world conspires to make it so. The work of the Rona Jaffe Foundation pushes back at the many forces that plot to constrict a woman’s voice; it makes a space for new kinds of hard-won female vision."