14th Annual Levis Reading Prize
Nick Lantz for We Don't Know We Don't Know

The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to announce that We Don’t Know We Don’t Know by Nick Lantz was selected as the winner of the 2011 Levis Reading Prize, awarded in the name of the late Larry Levis for the best first or second book of poetry published in the calendar year 2009. Mr. Lantz will receive an honorarium of $1500 and will be brought to Richmond all expenses paid for a reception and public reading in September, 2011.

Nick Lantz is the author of two recent collections of poetry. We Don’t Know We Don’t Know (Graywolf Press, 2010) won the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and the Council for Wisconsin Writers Posner Book-Length Poetry Award. The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010) was selected by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky for the Felix Pollak Prize. Lantz has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and his work has appeared in Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Poetry Daily, and FIELD, and has been featured on the nationally syndicated radio program The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. He has taught creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Tinker Mountain Writers’ Workshop, Queens University Low-Residency MFA, and Gettysburg College where he was the 2010-2011 Emerging Writer Lecturer. In fall 2011, he will join the faculty at Franklin and Marshall Colleges.

This year the Prize committee would also like to recognize two finalists, Nicky Beer for her collection The Diminishing House (Carnegie Mellon, 2010) and Daniel Johnson for How to Catch a Falling Knife (Alice James, 2010).

The Levis Reading Prize is presented on behalf of VCU's MFA in Creative Writing Program. Sponsors include the VCU Department of English, James Branch Cabell Library Associates, VCU Friends of the Library, the VCU Libraries, the VCU Honors College, Barnes & Noble@VCU, the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences, with additional funding provided by the family of Larry Levis.

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

For further information about the Levis Reading Prize, see http://www.has.vcu.edu/eng/resources/levis_prize.htm,
call 804.828.1329, or contact Emilia Philips, Levis Fellow, at phillipsea3@vcu.edu.