Philip Levine was born in 1928 in Detroit. He was formally educated in public schools and at Wayne University (now Wayne State University). After a succession of industrial jobs in Detroit, he left the city for good, first attending the writing workshop at the University of Iowa, where he received an MFA in 1957. He then lived in various parts of the country before settling in Fresno, California, where he taught at the state university until his retirement. He also taught in many other places, including Columbia; Princeton; Brown; the University of California, Berkeley; and New York University, where he served as poet in residence for over a decade.
He received many awards for his books of poems, including two National Book Awards—in 1980 for Ashes: Poems Old and New and in 1991 for What Work Is—and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth. He also won the Ruth Lilly Prize in Poetry and the Wallace Stevens Award. In 2006 he was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2011 was appointed poet laureate of the United States.
After he retired from teaching at California State University, Fresno, in 1992, he divided his time between Fresno, California, and Brooklyn, New York. He died in 2015.