12th Annual Levis Reading Prize
Katie Ford for Colosseum

The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to announce that Colosseum by Katie Ford was selected as the winner of the 2009 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 2008. Ms. Ford will receive an honorarium of $1000 and will be brought to Richmond all expenses paid for a reception and public reading in September, 2009.

Photo by K. Ford

Katie Ford is the author of Deposition and Colosseum, (Graywolf Press), and a chapbook, Storm (Marick Press). Colosseum was named a "Best Book of 2008" by Publishers Weekly and among the "Top Ten Books of Poetry in 2008" by Virginia Quarterly Review. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Pleiades, and Seneca Review, and are forthcoming from Smartish Pace, Bayou, and The New Yorker. Ford is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship. She teaches at Franklin & Marshall College and lives in Philadelphia with her husband, the novelist Josh Emmons.

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, Friends of the Library, the VCU Libraries, the VCU Honors College, Barnes & Noble @ VCU Bookstore, and the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences.

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 e-mail englishgrad@vcu.edu.