Rukeyser Trailblazer Jan Heller Levi
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 [...]
