Donald Lev was born in New York City in 1936. He attended Hunter College, worked in the wire rooms of both The Daily News and The New York Times, and then drove a taxi cab for twenty years (with a 6 year hiatus in which he ran messages for and contributed poetry to The Village Voice and operated the Home Planet Bookshop on the Lower East Side). His earliest poems appeared in print in 1958 and he started his first small press magazine, HYN Anthology, in 1969, the same year his brief underground film acting career pinnacled with his portrayal (he wrote his own lines) of the Poet in Robert Downey Sr.'s classic Putney Swope. He met Enid Dame (1943-2003) at a N. Y. Poet's Cooperative meeting in 1976. They became life partners in 1978, and in 1979 founded the literary tabloid Home Planet News, which Lev still publishes.