Blackbird Archive20th Annual Levis Reading Prize
20th Annual Levis Reading Prize
The 20th annual Levis Reading Prize was awarded to Iranian American poet Solmaz Sharif for her collection Look (Graywolf Press, 2016). Sharif and her writing were celebrated at an event held at Virginia Commonwealth University’s James Branch Cabell Library on the evening of March 29, 2018.
University Librarian John Ulmschneider’s welcome includes a special thanks to the sponsors of the Levis Reading Prize as well as supporters of the library’s other literary events and the acquisition of papers of Virginia writers, such as those archived in the Levis Collection.
Gregory Donovan’s “Larry Levis ‘In 1967,’ or, What Did You Do in the War, Daddy-o?” discusses the backgrounds of the Levis poem “In 1967,” published in Elegy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997).
Emily Block, the 2017–2018 Levis Fellow, introduces Solmaz Sharif and discusses the unique nature and strengths of her award-winning collection.
Solmaz Sharif’s reading from Look and newer work concludes the evening.
Gregory Donovan 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. His poetry, essays, translations, and fiction have been published in The Kenyon Review , The Southern Review , New England Review , TriQuarterly , diode , Crazyhorse , Gulf Coast , Copper Nickel , 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 senior editor at Blackbird . Photo by Michele Poulos
Solmaz Sharif is the author of the poetry collection Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, received the 2017 PEN Center Literary Award for Poetry, and received the 2018 Levis Prize. She holds degrees from New York University and University of California, Berkeley. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, Poetry, Kenyon Review, jubilat, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Witness, and others. Her work has been recognized with a “Discovery” Poetry Prize from the Boston Review, scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a winter fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, the 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. She is a lecturer at Stanford University.