Known for his poetry’s attention to the working class, Philip Levine, 83, was named the 2011-2012 U.S. Poet Laureate. His official title, conferred by the Library of Congress, will be Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, and he will serve from October of this year through May. The position comes with $35,000.

“Philip Levine is one of America’s great narrative poets,” said James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress, in a statement to the media. “His plainspoken lyricism has, for half a century, championed the art of telling ‘The Simple Truth’—about the hard work we do to make sense of our lives.”

Born and raised in Detroit, Levine worked in auto factories for a number of years before attending Wayne University and subsequently the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University. Since then, he has written twenty books of poetry; several anthologies, translations, and interviews; and an essay collection. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his collection, The Simple Truth. He has twice won both the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award.

According to the Huffington Post, Levine has a few plans for his role as Laureate, “There’s a great deal of American poetry that’s hardly known and that should be known. As a poet who didn’t get published for a long time, I know what it’s like not to be read,” he said. “The other thing I’d like to do is reach out to readers. I would like to bring attention to the kind of people I’ve written about.”

Levine succeeds recent laureates including W.S. Merwin (the previous appointee), Kay Ryan, Ted Kooser, and Louise Gluck. Levine currently splits his time between homes in Fresno, CA and Brooklyn, NY.