VCU presents awards to poet and fiction writers

By Mike Frontiero
VCU School of Education

RICHMOND, Va. - A poet and a fiction writer are winners of two distinguished literary awards presented by the Department of English and the Creative Writing Program at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Susan Aizenberg, an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., received the Levis Reading Prize for "Muse," her first full-length collection of poetry.  The book brings together poems of personal history, and the complex lives of artists, writers, and ordinary people, in an exploration of the relationship between art and life, esthetics and ethics. 

A $1,000 honorarium accompanied the prize, which was awarded for the best first or second book of poetry published in 2002. The award was established in 1998 in memory of Larry Levis, a distinguished poet and teacher at VCU who died in 1996. The department and program sponsor this annual award to encourage poets early in their careers.

Aizenberg is coeditor of the anthology of poetry "The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women," a contributing editor to the Nebraska Review, and author of a collection of poems called "Peru," which appears in Take Three: 2: AGNI New Poets Series. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in literary publications including The Journal, AGNI, Chelsea, Prairie Schooner, as well as the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

Isabel Zuber of Winston-Salem, N.C., was presented the First Novelist Award for her debut novel "Salt," which traces the joys and the sorrows of a passionate but troubled Appalachia marriage at the turn of the last century. The award recognizes rising new talents in the literary world who have successfully published a first novel.

Zuber was born and raised in Boone, N.C., and was a librarian at Wake Forest University for many years.  Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in a number of literary magazines, including The American Voice, Poetry, Now & Then, Pembroke Magazine, and Shenandoah. 

"Writers publishing their first or even second books often face a discouraging lack of attention and publicity, even when that work is excellent," said Gregory E. Donovan, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of English who has served as one of the judges for the Levis Award since its inception. "Old hands in publishing joke that it's like tossing a feather into the Grand Canyon. The Levis Reading Prize and the First Novelist Award help to bring wide attention to remarkable early works by extraordinary writers."

Recipients of the two awards are selected by a panel of faculty in VCU's Creative Writing Program.