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2023 Levis Reading Prize Welcome

Gregory Donovan

Good evening, my name is Gregory Donovan, I teach in the creative writing program here at VCU, and I’m the Director of the Levis Reading Prize. I warmly welcome you who are here in person and all of you out there in virtual-land to the celebration of the 2023 Levis Reading Prize, which this year goes to Corey Van Landingham for her book, Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens.

The Levis Prize is presented by the MFA in Creative Writing program in the VCU Department of English and by VCU Libraries, with additional support from the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences and the family of Larry Levis. For their invaluable assistance in making the arrangements for this evening, I also want to thank Ryan Pander and the event staff of VCU Libraries who not only arranged for hosting this event here in the library but also for broadcasting it to our audience online.

And now, for the sake of the people around you here, as well as for the recording of this event, please kindly mute your cell phones and then put them away, if you haven’t already done so.

The judging of this prize is the culmination of a year-long process to select the most outstanding first or second poetry collection published in English in the previous calendar year. First, graduate students in our MFA in Creative Writing program read the submitted books and choose a group of finalists who go into the next round where a final decision is made by the program’s creative writing faculty in poetry.

In that way, this is a community process, and a big thank you to the graduate students who participated, and a special thanks is owed to last year’s Levis Prize coordinator, Katy Scarlett, who collected the books and supervised the judging of well over a hundred entries, and many thanks as well to this year’s Levis Prize coordinator, another outstanding and dedicated student in our MFA program, Paul Brennan, who has not only undertaken that same task but also, with the alert assistance of Thom Didato in our department, has helped to provide a great deal of the background logistics work required to publicize and to organize this evening. Thank you all.

Read Greg Donovan’s essay on Levis’s “Some Grass Along a Ditch Bank.”

Photo of Greg Donovan

Gregory Donovan

Gregory Donovan, founding editor, is the author of the poetry collections Torn from the Sun (Red Hen Press, 2015), long-listed for the Julie Suk Award, and Calling His Children Home (University of Missouri Press, 1993), which won the Devins Award for Poetry, as well as the co-editor (with Michele Poulos) of Prismatics: Larry Levis & Contemporary American Poetry (Diode Editions, 2020). His poetry, essays, translations, and fiction have been published in the Kenyon Review, the Southern Review, New England Review, TriQuarterly, diode, and many other journals. His work has also appeared in several anthologies, including Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets of Virginia (University of Virginia Press, 2003). Among other awards for his writing, he is the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Award from New England Writers as well as grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and fellowships from the Ucross Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Donovan has served as a visiting writer and guest faculty for a number of summer conferences and low-residency programs, such as the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Chautauqua Institution Writers’ Center, the River Pretty Writers Retreat, the VCFA Postgraduate Writers’ Conference, and the University of Tampa MFA program. With the writer/director Michele Poulos, he is a producer of A Late Style of Fire, the feature-length documentary on the life and work of the late Larry Levis. Donovan is a founding faculty member of Virginia Commonwealth University’s graduate creative writing program. He is a contributing and founding editor of Blackbird.