Max Ritvo Comments

Max Ritvo (December 19,1990 – August 23,2016) was an American poet from Los Angeles, California. Milkweed Editions posthumously published a full-length collection of his poems, 'Four Reincarnations', to positive critical reviews. Milkweed published 'Letters from Max' (co-written with Sarah Ruhl) and a second collection of Ritvo's poems, 'The Final Voicemails', in September 2018.

A graduate of Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, Ritvo earned his BA in English from Yale University, where he studied with the poet Louise Glück, and his MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. In 2014, he was awarded a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for his chapbook AEONS.

He edited poetry at Parnassus: Poetry in Review and was a teaching fellow at Columbia. On August 1,2015, he married Victoria Jackson-Hanen, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at Princeton University. Ritvo was diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma at age 16 and died from the disease.