Matthew Tuckner is the winner of the 2026 Levis Reading Prize for his debut full-length poetry collection The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The prize is awarded annually for the best first or second book of poetry published in the previous calendar year and chosen by the MFA in Creative Writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University. The prize honors the memory of poet Larry Levis, who was a VCU faculty member at the time of his death in 1996. Tuckner will receive an award of $5,000 and will give a reading from his work on October 29^th at 7 p.m. in the James Branch Cabell Library Lecture Hall on the VCU campus, scheduled as a hybrid event held both in person and available online.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published by Four Way Books in 2025. Matthew Tuckner received his MFA in Creative Writing at NYU and is currently a PhD student in English/Creative Writing at University of Utah, where he is Managing Editor of Western Humanities Review. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Nation, Kenyon Review, and Best New Poets, among others. His upcoming poetry collection, Cloud Chamber, is also set to be published by Four Way Books in 2028.

Through fifty-three poems that share the same title, Tuckner creates a landscape that compels readers to navigate philosophy, history and ecological collapses hand-in-hand with the vast expanses of private grief and longings. The poems capture contemporary and ancient catastrophes with a vividness that is electric, often surprising and deeply distinct to Tuckner’s voice. Erick Verran notes in The Hopkins Review, ‘The funny thing about Tuckner’s attention is that it manages to be at once logical and comic.’ Commending the collection’s intricately juxtapositioned worlds, Catherine Barnett describes reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 'like listening to someone record the apocalypse happening in real time in language so charged and with images so vivid you might forget the apocalypse is here.’

In winning the Levis Reading Prize, Matthew Tuckner joins a list of celebrated past recipients, including Weijia Pan for Motherlands, Elisa Gonzalez for Grand Tour, Corey Van Landingham for Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens, Ilya Kaminsky for Deaf Republic, Jenny Xie for Eye Level, Kaveh Akbar for Calling a Wolf a Wolf, and Solmaz Sharif for Look, among many more.

This event is presented by the M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program in the VCU Department of English and by VCU Libraries, with additional support from the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences and the family of Larry Levis. For further information about the prize, visit the webpage, call 804-828-1329, or you may contact Bhavya Bhagtani, 2026 Levis Reading Prize Coordinator, at levis@vcu.edu or Edgar Kunz and Devon Walker-Figueroa, Co-Directors of the Levis Reading Prize, at kunze@vcu.edu and walkerfigud@vcu.edu respectively.