Philip Levine was born in 1928 in Detroit, where he studied at Wayne University. After working as a labourer, he settled in Fresno, California, and also lived in other countries for some time, including Spain. He taught at Fresno until his retirement, and now divides his time between Fresno and Brooklyn, New York. Levine has received many awards for his poetry, including the National Book Award (1980 & 1991), and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth. He has published 17 collections of poems and two books of essays, and was appointed US Poet Laureate in 2011 at the age of 83.

Stranger to Nothing: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2006) covers his American collections from On the Edge (1963) to Breath (2004). It is his first UK publication since Secker published an earlier Selected Poems in 1984. He has since published a later collection, News of the World (Knopf, 2009).