The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to announce that Seven-Star Bird by David Daniel has been selected as the winner of the Seventh Annual 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 2003. Mr. Daniel will receive an honorarium of $1000 and will be invited to Richmond all expenses paid for a reception and public reading in September, 2004. In addition, his work will be featured in the fall 2004 issue of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts, published jointly by VCU and New Virginia Review, Inc.

Photo by Melissa Frost

Seven-Star Bird was published by Graywolf Press and is Mr. Daniel's first full-length collection. He is the poetry editor of Ploughshares magazine. His poems and reviews have appeared in numerous journals, including Agni, Harvard Review, the Literary Review, Post Road, and Witness. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife and their sons.

We would like to express our most sincere thanks to all who entered and thus made this seventh 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