The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to announce that Radial Symmetry by Katherine Larson has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Levis Reading Prize for the best first or second book of poetry published in the calendar year 2011. The award is named in memory of the late Larry Levis, the poet who taught at VCU. Larson will receive an honorarium of $2000 and will be brought to Richmond, expenses paid, for a reception and public reading on September 20th, 2012.

Katherine Larson’s Radial Symmetry (Yale University Press, 2011) was also selected by Louise Glück as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Larsen’s work has appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry, and Poetry Northwest, among other publications. She is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. In addition to her literary career, Larson has worked as a molecular biologist and field ecologist. She lives in Arizona with her husband and daughter.

This year the Prize Committee would also like to recognize the outstanding books of two additional finalists, Anthony Carelli for his collection Carnations (Princeton University Press, 2011) and Brian Barker for The Black Ocean (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011).

The Levis Reading Prize is presented on behalf of VCU’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. Sponsors include the VCU Department of English, James Branch Cabell Library Associates, VCU Friends of the Library, the VCU Libraries, the VCU Honors College, Barnes & Noble @ VCU, and the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences, with primary funding provided by the family of Larry Levis.

We would like to express our sincere thanks to all who entered and thus helped to make this annual contest such a success.

For further information about the Levis Reading Prize, see http://www.has.vcu.edu/eng/resources/levis_prize/levis_prize.htm, call 804.828.1329, or contact Katelyn Kiley, Levis Fellow, at kileyk@vcu.edu