VCU news

By Gregory Donovan
VCU Department of English

Elisa Gonzalez has won the 2024 Levis Reading Prize for her poetry collection “Grand Tour.” The prize is awarded annually for the best first or second book of poetry published in the previous calendar year, and the winner is chosen by the MFA in Creative Writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University. The prize honors the memory of poet Larry Levis, who was a VCU faculty member at the time of his death in 1996.

Gonzalez will receive an award of $5,000 and will give a reading from her work in the James Branch Cabell Library Lecture Hall on the VCU campus, to be scheduled as a hybrid event for in-person attendance and streaming online.

“Grand Tour,” Gonzalez’s debut full-length poetry collection, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2023 and was named one of the best books of that year by The New Yorker. Her individual poems have been published in The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, The Paris Review and other publications.

A graduate of Yale University and the New York University MFA program, Gonzalez has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Rolex Foundation and the U.S. Fulbright Program. She is also the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Whiting Award. FSG will also publish her novel, “The Awakenings,” and a nonfiction book, “Strangers on Earth.”

“Grand Tour” has received widespread acclaim for Gonzalez’s lyricism and deft examination of philosophy, narrative and the nature of perception as well as grief — pained contemplations arising from the murder of her brother — while crossing borders of all kinds in a challenge to remake the self. As Maggie Millner commented in The Yale Review, these poems strike a balance between “formal control, affective intensity and imagistic beauty” in a book whose settings and themes are “dizzyingly various, giving the impression of a life made up of many disparate eras and selves.”  

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, C. Francis Fisher noted, “‘Grand Tour’ offers a speaker who resists any overly simplistic viewpoint, instead maintaining a sense of opposition to prepackaged ideology or form. ... She writes at the margins of what is possible, creating new forms where old ones lack, and carving a space for the continual journey onward.”

In winning the Levis Reading Prize, Gonzalez joins a list of celebrated recipients – including Corey Van Landingham for “Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens” (Tupelo Press), Ilya Kaminsky for “Deaf Republic” (Graywolf Press), Jenny Xie for “Eye Level” (Graywolf Press) and Kaveh Akbar for “Calling a Wolf a Wolf” (Alice James Books) – since the award’s debut in 1998.

The upcoming event is presented by the MFA in Creative Writing program in the VCU Department of English and by VCU Libraries, with additional support from the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences and the family of Larry Levis. For further information, visit the prize website, call 804-828-1329, or contact Julia St. John, 2024 Levis Reading Prize coordinator, at levis@vcu.edu, or Gregory Donovan, director of the Levis Reading Prize, at gdonovan@vcu.edu.