Description

Corey Van Landingham, the 2023 Levis Reading Prize winner, will read from her poetry collection Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens.

The prize is awarded annually for the best debut or second book of poetry published in the previous calendar year and is chosen by the M.F.A. in Creative Writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University. For more information about the Levis prize, please visit the levis website. 

Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens, Van Landingham’s second collection, was published by Tupelo Press in 2022. She is also the author of Antidote (2013), winner of the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry, and her latest collection, Reader, I, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in April, 2024. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship as well as a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Boston Review, The New Yorker, Blackbird, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among many other publications. 

The event is free and open to all and will be held in person but will also be live streamed through Zoom. The in-person location will be James Branch Cabell Library, Room 303, 901 Park Ave., Richmond, Va. 23219. Parking is available for a fee in the West Broad Street, West Main Street and West Cary Street parking decks.

For questions or accommodations, please contact the VCU Libraries Events Office at rbpander@vcu.edu or (804) 828-0593.

Register

Registration is required.

About the Author

Corey Van Landingham is the author of Antidote and Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens, and Reader, I, which is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in 2024. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Boston Review, New England Review, The New Yorker, The Sewanee Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois. 

Sponsors

The Levis Reading Prize is presented on behalf of VCU's M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program in partnership with VCU Libraries. Sponsors include the VCU Department of English and the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences, with additional funding provided by the family of Larry Levis.