VCU news

By Brian McNeill

Roger Reeves has been named the winner of the 2014 Levis Reading Prize, which is awarded by Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of English and its M.F.A. in Creative Writing program, for his poetry collection "King Me."

The prize is awarded annually in the name of the late Larry Levis for the best first or second book of poetry published in the previous calendar year. Reeves will receive an award of $2,000 and will read from his prize-winning work on Oct. 9 at 7 p.m. at the Grace Street Theater, 934 W Grace St.

Poems by Roger Reeves have appeared in Best American Poetry, Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Tin House and the 2014 edition of The Pushcart Prize. Copper Canyon Press published "King Me," Reeves' first book of poems, in 2013. He has been awarded a 2014-15 Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and a 2008 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. Reeves is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

This year the prize committee also recognized the books of two additional finalists: Maria Hummel for her collection "House and Fire" (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), and Brian Russell for "The Year of What Now" (Graywolf Press, 2013).

Sponsors for the Levis Reading Prize include VCU's Department of English, VCU Libraries, Barnes & Noble@VCU and VCU's College of Humanities and Sciences, with additional funding provided by the family of Larry Levis. The prize honors the memory of poet Levis, who served on the creative writing faculty at VCU at the time of his death in 1996.

For further information about the Levis Reading Prize, see http://english.vcu.edu/mfa/levis/, call (804) 828-1329, or contact Christian Detisch, Levis Fellow: detischc@vcu.edu or Gregory Donovan, director of the Levis Reading Prize: gdonovan@vcu.edu.