Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Off-Season
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jen-levitt-13251087/ * NOTE: May not be accurate. Maybe not same person.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Dartmouth College, graduated, 2004; New York University, M.F.A., c. 2006.
ADDRESS
CAREER
New York City Department of Education, former high school English teacher; Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, New York City, curriculum writer.
WRITINGS
Contributor of poems to periodicals, including Boston Review, CutBank, Literary Review, No, Dear, Sixth Finch, and Tin House.
SIDELIGHTS
Jen Levitt is a graduate of Dartmouth College, where she studied creative writing. She credits her mentors for nurturing her nascent interest in poetry. After college, Levitt became a teacher and mentor herself, notably in New York City, in the Bronx. After six years she moved on to an enrichment program called Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, where low-income secondary students work with mentors like Levitt to prepare for a college education and for life after high school.
In an interview by Kristin Maffei posted at the Dartmouth College Alumni Web site, Levitt said that “reading and writing poetry is a way of entering into a conversation with poets who have come before and those who will come after.” She also continued to write poetry, some of which has been published in various literary magazines. Her work is collected in The Off-Season.
Levitt writes of the world around her: city streets, her classroom, current events, television shows. She writes of adolescence and sex and gender and girlfriends; of fitting in and feeling alone. She finds words to express the thoughts and feelings that young people often leave unsaid. Levitt’s poems connect past and present by imagining Emily Dickinson in a twenty-first-century setting and crafting letters to the deceased poet Elizabeth Bishop. A Publishers Weekly contributor called The Off-Season a “refreshingly accessible” collection “that makes readers feel a little less alone.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, August 15, 2016, review of The Off-Season, p. 49.
ONLINE
Dartmouth College Alumni Website, http://alumni.dartmouth.edu/ (February 21, 2017), Kristin Maffei, author interview.
Four Way Books Website, https://fourwaybooks.com/ (May 6, 2017), author profile.
LC control no.: n 2016020475
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016020475
HEADING: Levitt, Jen
000 00389cz a2200133n 450
001 10134128
005 20160421170444.0
008 160414n| azannaabn |a aaa
010 __ |a n 2016020475
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |d DLC
053 _0 |a PS3612.E9345
100 1_ |a Levitt, Jen
400 1_ |a Levitt, Jennifer
670 __ |a The off-season, 2016: |b ECIP t.p. (Jen Levitt) data view (full name: Jennifer Levitt)
MAY NOT BE ACCURATE: AUTHOR TELLS INTERVIEWER THAT SHE SPENT 4 YEARS AT DARTMOUTH, BEGINNING AT AGE 18, AND GRADUATING IN 2004.
Jen Levitt
Teacher at New York City Department of Education
New York City Department of Education City University of New York-Herbert H. Lehman College
Elmsford, New York 37 37 connections
Send InMail
Experience
New York City Department of Education
Teacher
Company NameNew York City Department of Education
Dates EmployedSep 2002 – Present Employment Duration14 yrs 9 mos
From 2002-2007, I worked as an early elementary teacher in grades K-2. Since September 2007, I have been teaching 6th and 7th grade math, fully implementing the Common Core standards for the past 2 years.
See less See less about Teacher, New York City Department of Education
Whitney Museum of American Art
Coordinator of Corporate Partnerships
Company NameWhitney Museum of American Art
Dates EmployedAug 2000 – May 2002 Employment Duration1 yr 10 mos
At the Whitney Museum, I worked with Director and Manager of Corporate Partnerships to ensure corporate donors received all of the benefits that their donation entitled them to. I also assisted in planning events for the corporate donors.
See less See less about Coordinator of Corporate Partnerships, Whitney Museum of American Art
Education
City University of New York-Herbert H. Lehman College
City University of New York-Herbert H. Lehman College
Degree Name MS Ed Field Of Study Elementary Education and Teaching
Dates attended or expected graduation 2002 – 2004
Hamilton College
Hamilton College
Degree Name BA Field Of Study Art History
Dates attended or expected graduation 1996 – 2000
Jen Levitt
Jen Levitt received her MFA from NYU. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Tin House, Sixth Finch, The Literary Review, CutBank, No, Dear and elsewhere. She lives in New York City and teaches high school students.
Three Questions for Jen Levitt ’04
By Kristin Maffei
Tuesday, February 21, 2017
NEWS TYPE
Three Questions
Jen Levitt ’04 A&S’06 is the author of The Off-Season, a debut work of poetry that traces a trajectory from girlhood to adulthood and brings to the surface feelings that ordinarily stay hidden. She is also an educator in New York City.
The Off-Season cover
How did Dartmouth help prepare you as a writer and educator?
Dartmouth was integral in preparing me to be a writer! I was so lucky to study with two wonderful poets, Cleopatra Mathis and Cynthia Huntington, over the course of my four years. Although this is embarrassing and shameful, I remember being annoyed that I didn't place out of English 5 my freshman fall; you had to get a perfect score of the verbal portion of the SAT, which I definitely didn't. But because of that, I was able to sign up for a seminar with Professor Huntington my freshman winter on contemporary poetry. We read Gregory Corso's hilarious poem "Marriage" and the Beat poets, as well as Robert Creeley and others I'm now forgetting. I wrote a few pretty bad poems in that class, but what I remember more than anything is Professor Huntington's unwavering passion for talking about poems.
It was the start of my poetry life at Dartmouth, which I continued in my creative writing classes with Professor Mathis. We'd sit in those old chairs and sofas in the big room in Sanborn with her dog Magellan sprawled on the floor—I still have the comments she wrote on my poems when I was 18 and 19 years old. Professor Mathis treated everyone in the class like they were a real poet, even though we were just college students starting out, and it made all the difference. With her I read many of the poets I'm still in love with today—Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, Louise Gluck. The creative writing program was, hands down, the best part of my Dartmouth experience.
How does your work as a poet feed into your work as an educator, and vice-versa?
I was an eighth-grade English teacher in the Bronx for six years, and now I write curriculum for an academic enrichment program called Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO Scholars), which helps motivated, low-income high school students in New York City get into and through competitive colleges. After the election, students and staff alike were noticeably shaken; many of our students come from immigrant families and a number are undocumented. I swapped the scheduled lesson for one about "political poetry" where students, through reading a selection of poems; from excerpts of Ginsberg's "America" to poems by Lucille Clifton, Danez Smith, and Fady Joudah; tried to define for themselves the term "political poetry" and why or how it might be important or relevant during times of turmoil.
Being able to draw on a wide range of poems and poets helps me in a pinch, and being a reader in general—in all genres—is probably the biggest asset when it comes to writing curriculum for high school students. On the flip side, I find it difficult to write about teaching in my poems, but I have a few poems that try. One is about an SEO student, Gabriel, who I taught when he was a freshman. Now he's a junior, and I just got up the courage to show him my poem about him the other day; I was more nervous watching him read the poem than I am to read in front of an audience! But he liked it, so I could relax.
Why is poetry still relevant today?
Boston Review, one of the best magazines for contemporary poetry in my opinion, recently listed its top 25 poems of 2016, preceded by an introduction from the Editors. I think these lines sum up why I feel poetry is relevant today: "...Our twenty-five most-read poems cannot turn back time, at least not literally, only literarily, and being merely words, they can’t really change the world around them, not on their own. They need people to do that. But they can continue to affect their changes on us as people, sending us back into the world with broadened receptivity, strengthened commitments, and sharpened focus."
For me personally, <
The Off-Season
Publishers Weekly. 263.33 (Aug. 15, 2016): p49.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Listen
Full Text:
The Off-Season
Jen Levitt. Four Way (UPNE, dish), $15.95 trade paper (76p) ISBN 978-1-935536-772
Levitt, a high school teacher, confronts everyday angst in her charming debut collection. Pulling inspiration variously from television, the classroom, and the New York City streetscape, Levitt's poems are <
“Can a poem be gentle and fierce at the same time? Can a poem make you smile because it's so heartbreaking and cry because it's so sharp? Can it be bracingly particular and achingly universal? In The Off-Season, Jen Levitt says yes, and her yes sounds like no one else's. She knows that to live is to be an anachronism, she knows how to talk back to her heroines, poetic and otherwise, and she knows that identity is an 'imperfect system.' Anyone who has ever struggled to come of age, as an artist, as a human, will find themselves in this book.” — Kathleen Ossip
“Jen Levitt's first collection is witty, vulnerable, and fiercely observant. She is the odd love child of Frank O'Hara and Elizabeth Bishop with a charm and intelligence all her own. Conversational and intimate in its details, The Off-Season radiates sincerity, and Levitt's voice—bold, humble, questioning, quirky—is captivating.” — Rachel Zucker
“In Jen Levitt's wonderful debut, The Off-Season, the objects of the everyday become luminous guides to a deepening understanding of the self. These are poems of identity that are also about the inadequacy of such an idea. The body practices layups, the body is 'soaked & amplified/with newness,' the body wants what it wants and sometimes even gets it. And then what? This is a book for this moment in that this moment keeps happening again and again. Which makes it timeless and utterly necessary.” — Gabrielle Calvocoressi