It may be hard to believe but we're about to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Levis Reading Prize. For nearly a decade, the award has not only helped shine a light upon the work of former VCU professor and acclaimed poet Larry Levis, but also has helped bring national recognition to contemporary poets early in their careers.

Photo by Ralph Alswang

In this regard, we are pleased to announce that From the Book of Giants by Joshua Weiner was selected as the winner of the Tenth Annual Levis Reading Prize. Mr. Weiner will receive an honorarium of $1000 and will be brought to Richmond, all expenses paid, for a reception and public reading in September, 2007. In addition, his work was featured in the fall 2007 issue of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts, published jointly by VCU and New Virginia Review, Inc.

From the Book of Giants was published by The University of Chicago Press. Weiner is the author of The World's Room. He is the recent recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a Whiting Writers’ Award. He has published poems and prose in Best American Poetry, the Nation, the American Scholar, New York Review of Books, Chicago Tribune, Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Yale Review, Slate, and elsewhere. Weiner has written poems about the need for music, the fear of fatherhood, and the fear of a beloved child growing up and disappearing. His poems employ formal conventions in unexpected ways, and they have a searching quality about them, a vivid clarity.

We would like to express our most sincere thanks to all who entered and thus made this tenth contest such a success.