Richard Levine’s Now in Contest (Fernwood Press, 2023) is now available at http://www.fernwoodpress.com. He is also the author of Richard Levine: Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2019) and Contiguous States (Finishing Line Press, 2018), as well as five chapbooks. In 2022, he organized and co-edited “Invasion of Ukraine 2022: Poems.” In 2021, he received the Connecticut Poetry Society Award and contributed to American Book Review.
Richard Levine
Richard Levine was born in Brooklyn, NY. He attended public schools and the School of Visual Arts, before serving in Vietnam with the U.S. Marine Corps, 1966-68. He earned a BA in English at Fordham University, and an MA in Creative Writing from CUNY, where he studied with William Matthews and Frederick Tuten. He also studied with David Ignatow at the 92nd Street Y, Unterberg Poetry Center.
His poetry has appeared in former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s column, American Life in Poetry, and at Poetry Foundation. In 2012, his A Tide of a Hundred Mountains won the Bright Hill Press Chapbook Award. His books, papers, drawing and songs are archived in the Connolly Special Collections Library (The Imaginative Representations of the Vietnam War Collection), at LaSalle University ( https://library.lasalle.edu ).
In 2019, after the death of his friend, Nicholas Johnson, the founding editor of BigCityLit, Levine and Barry Wallenstein stepped in to co-edit and resurrect the online journal. They now serve as BCL Associate Editors.
Though not genetically disposed to list things in alphabetic order, he’s an abecedarian by design and so designed his resume to read as follows: Levine has worked as a busboy, cab driver, carpenter’s assistant, curriculum writer, deliverer of carpets – both magic and woven, legal and illegal – floor sander, house renovator, journalist, musician, pamphleteer, soldier in a war, speechwriter, and the labor he most loved: public school teacher. His curriculum “Bringing Black History Home: Oral Expressions of the Black Experience from Africa to Montgomery to Bedford Stuyvesant”is archived in the Institute of Education Sciences (ERIC), https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED349357
He is available for readings through the New York State Council on the Arts