The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University 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, awarded in the name of the late Larry Levis for the best first or second book of poetry published in the calendar year 2006. 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.

Photo by Ralph Alswang

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, 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.

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.