Peter Levitt

Peter Levitt (born September 2, 1946 in New York City) is a Canadian poet and translator. He is also the founder and teacher of the Salt Spring Zen Circle, in the Soto Zen lineage of Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi.

Background He has taught poetry, writing and creativity workshops and seminars around the world, including at the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, Naropa Institute Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and as a faculty member in poetry and translation for the MFA Writers Program at Antioch University, a program he designed with Eloise Klein Healy. He emigrated to Canada in 2000 and became a citizen shortly thereafter. Once there, he taught translation in the University of British Columbia Creative Writing Optional Residency MFA Program. He was in the anthology and film, Poets Against the War. He was at the 2009 Montreal Zen Poetry Festival.

He is the father of a daughter, Sheba, and a son, Tai, and lives with his wife, the poet Shirley Graham on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia.

Awards 1989 Lannan Foundation Literary Award in Poetry 2004 Canada Council for the Arts

Work Poetry Blissful Monkey Press 2011 (Second Edition)

Essays

Editor / Translator

Kazuaki Tanahashi (August 2010) Shobo Genzo: Zen Master Dogen's Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, associate editor, Peter Levitt The Essential Dogen: Writings of the Great Zen Master (Shambhala Publications, April 2013) edited by Peter Levitt and Kazuaki Tanahashi The Complete Cold Mountain: Poems of the Legendary Hermit Hanshan. (Shambhala Publications, 2018) Translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt Yin Mountain: The Immortal Poetry of Three Daoist Women, Translated with Rebecca Nie. Shambhala Publications. 2022.