Jan Heller Levi was 24 years old, when she first met Muriel Rukeyser and became her personal assistant, helping her through the final months of her life.   It was 1978, and in her introduction to A Muriel Rukeyser Reader Jan vividly recalls that from the moment a fragile but somehow lionlike Rukeyser opened her apartment door, “I was hers.” 

Fourteen years after Rukeyser’s death, in 1994, A Muriel Rukeyser Reader appeared, generously conceived and expertly edited by Heller Levi, by then a published poet and faculty of Creative Writing at Hunter College. Most of Rukeyser’s books were already out of print, and A Muriel Rukeyser Reader took on the momentous task of introducing a new generation of readers to Rukeyser’s wide-flung, heterogenous body of work. Finally, those of us who had never encountered Rukeyser’s words in college literature anthologies or graduate courses had a chance to read and study her on our own.

In putting together A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, Heller Levi wanted to create more than a compilation of Rukeyser’s “greatest hits.” Instead she was intent on giving readers a sense of her journey, from her early works that garnered early praise,  and the crucial, long-ignored middle period of the forties and fifties when Rukeyser fell out of favor, to the late 60s and 70s when she was rediscovered by a younger generation of feminist poets and celebrated, in Ann Sexton’s memorable words, as “beautiful Muriel, Mother of Everyone.” Heller Levi sought to include excerpts of it all. To this day, A Muriel Rukeyser Reader offers the most comprehensive introduction to Rukeyser’s stunningly versatile body of work. 

Jan Heller Levi was born in 1954 in New York City.  She earned a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, where Muriel Rukeyser’s good friend, the poet Jane Cooper, was her teacher. She went on to teach at Sarah Lawrence and other places before becoming a full-time faculty in Hunter’s MFA program. Heller Levi published four collections of poetry: Once I Gazed at You in Wonder (1999), winner of the 1998 Walt Whitman Award; Skyspeak: Poems (2005); Orphan (2014); and That’s the Way to Travel (2019). 

And she kept promoting recognition of Rukeyser’s work. Besides serving as consulting editor for The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (2004), edited by Anne Herzog and Janet Kaufman, she took on the invaluable work of preparing a new edition of Rukeyser’s Elegies (1949), published in 2013 by New Directions. Written, as Heller Levi explains, “over a decade of war–the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the beginnings of the cold war,” MR’s Elegies “capture the spirit, the anguish, and the desperate hopes of that daunting, world-changing time.”

Committed to poets for whom poetry is a crucial form of grasping, not only the personal but history as it unfolds in individual and collective life, Heller Levi and her partner of many years, the Swiss writer Christoph Keller, have more recently devoted their energy to preserving and amplifying the important creative work of American poet June Jordan: They edited and introduced We’re on: A June Jordan Reader (2017) and The Essential June Jordan (2021). With Sara Miles, JHL  co-edited Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (2005).

Jan Heller Levi now lives in St. Gallen, Switzerland, together with her husband, Christoph Keller. 

Works 

A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, edited by Jan Heller Levi (Norton 1994) 

“‘Too Much Life to Kill’: Some Thoughts on Muriel Rukeyser.” How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?: The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Anne F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman, pp. 282-286 (Palgrave 1999)

Muriel Rukeyser, Elegies, edited by Jan Heller Levi, introduced by Jan Heller Levi and Christoph Keller (New Directions, 2013)

Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, edited by Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)

We’re On: A June Jordan Reader, edited by Christoph Keller and Jan Heller Levi (Alice James Book, 2017)

The Essential June Jordan, edited by Jan Heller Levi and Christoph Ketter (Copper Canyon Press, 2021)

Poetry:

Once I Gazed at You in Wonder: Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 1999)

Skyspeak: Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 2005)

Orphan (Alice James Books, 2014)

That’s the Way to Travel/So sollte man reisen (Moloko, 2019)

 

To cite this entry: Elisabeth Däumer, “Rukeyser Trailblazer Jan Heller Levi,” Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, 2026, https://murielrukeyser.org/2026/09/04/rukeyser-trailblazer-jan-heller-levi/