Levine served as poet laureate from 2011 to 2012. He won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Simple Truth” in 1995 and two National Book Awards for “What Work Is” (1991) and “Ashes: Poems New and Old” (1980).
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“You grow up in a place and it becomes the arena of your discovery,” he told the Detroit Free Press in 2011. “It also became the arena of my discovery of the nature of American capitalism and the sense of how ordinary people have no choice at all in how they’re going to be formed by the society. My politics were formed by the city.”
