As a part of the VCU Visiting Writers Series, poets Dana Levin and Matthew Zapruder will be reading at 8PM April 5th in the VCU Commons, Richmond Salons. This event is free and open to the public.

Dana Levin’s first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was published by American Poetry Review (Copper Canyon) and went on to receive nearly every award available to first books and emerging poets. Copper Canyon brought out her second book, Wedding Day, in 2005 and her third, Sky Burial, in 2011. The Los Angeles Times says of her work, “Dana Levin’s poems are extravagant…her mind keeps making unexpected connections and the poems push beyond convention…they surprise us.” Her work has appeared in many anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers, The Poet’s Child, This Art, American Poetry: The Next Generation, and in magazines such as The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Paris Review and The American Poetry Review. She currently teaches Creative Writing at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon, 2010), which was the Goodreads Readers’ Choice selection for poetry, and was also selected as one of the year’s top five poetry books by Publishers Weekly, as well as the 2010 Booklist Editors’ Choice for poetry, and the 2010 Northern California Independent Booksellers Association poetry book of the year. His poems, essays and translations have appeared in many publications, including Bomb, Slate, Poetry, Tin House, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Real Simple, and The Los Angeles Times. He has received a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, a William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Currently he works as an editor for Wave Books and teaches as a member of the core faculty of UCR-Palm Desert’s Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing.

The VCU Visiting Writers Series is sponsored by the Department of English of the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences and the Graduate Writers’ Association, with additional funding made possible through the generosity of James Branch Cabell Library Associates, Friends of the Library, the VCU Libraries, the VCU Honors College, Barnes & Noble @ VCU Bookstore, and the family of Larry Levis.

As a part of the VCU Visiting Writers Series, poet Linda Gregerson and author Darin Strauss will be reading at 8pm February 9th in the VCU Commons, Richmond Salons. This event is free and open to the public.   A Q&A session will immediately follow the reading.

Gregerson is the author of four poetry collections: Magnetic North, Waterborne, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, and Fire in the Conservatory. She has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poetry Society of America, and the Modern Poetry Association as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Mellon, and Bogliasco Foundations, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Magnetic North was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Waterborne won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep was a finalist for both The Poet’s Prize and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Granta, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Review (UK), and many other publications. She is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature.

Strauss is the international bestselling author of the New York Times Notable books Chang and Eng and The Real McCoy, and of the national bestseller More Than It Hurts You. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Half a Life. His work has been translated into fourteen languages and published in seventeen countries. Born in the Long Island town of Roslyn Harbor, Strauss attended Tufts University, where he studied with Jay Cantor. He is married to the journalist Susannah Meadows and is the father of identical twin boys. He currently resides in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches writing at New York University.

The VCU Visiting Writers Series is sponsored by the Department of English of the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences and the Graduate Writers’ Association, with additional funding made possible through the generosity of James Branch Cabell Library Associates, Friends of the Library, the VCU Libraries, the VCU Honors College, Barnes & Noble @ VCU Bookstore, and the family of Larry Levis.

For more information please visit us on the web at go.vcu.edu/readings or call 804-828-1329.