Poet Phillis Levin will visit Denison University as a Beck Visiting Writer to discuss "A History of a Sonnet." This lecture, set for 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday (Feb. 11) in Barney Davis Board Room, is free and open to the public. Levin will also present a poetry reading at 8 p.m. on the same day in Barney Davis Board Room.

Levin is a professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at Hofstra University and teaches for both the Unterberg Poetry Center of the Ninety-Second Street YMCA in New York and graduate writing programs at New York University. She was educated at Sarah Lawrence College and Johns Hopkins University and taught English and creative writing at University of Maryland, College Park from 1989 to 2001.

Levin received an Ingram Merrill Grant, a 1995 Fulbright Fellowship to Slovenia and a 2003 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She has served as a fellow at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and The Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities in Bogliasco, Italy, and is an Elector of the American Poets' Corner of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. Levin lived in Italy from 2000 to 2001 as the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar.

The author of three volumes of poetry includingTemples and Fields, winner of the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award,The AfterimageandMercury, Levin is also the editor ofThe Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition Taught in English. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary anthologies and publications such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Partisan Review and The Atlantic. Levin traveled in 2001 to London to speak about the sonnet with Sir Frank Kermode and Jonathan Bate on the program "In Our Time," a weekly broadcast on the history of ideas on BBC Radio 4.

The Beck Lecture Series was endowed in memory of Harriet Ewens Beck to bring outstanding writers to the Denison campus. The series has hosted such writers as Eudora Welty, Alice Walker, Tom Stoppard and W. S. Merwin. Under the sponsorship of the fund, 10 to 12 writers read from their works and participate in master classes each year.

About Denison:

Denison University, founded in 1831, is an independent, residential liberal arts institution located in Granville, Ohio. A highly selective college enrolling 2,100 full-time undergraduate students from all 50 states and dozens of foreign countries, Denison is a place where innovative faculty and motivated students collaborate in rigorous scholarship, civic engagement and the cultivation of independent thinking.

For press inquiries:

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