Description

Solmaz Sharif, winner of the 2018 Levis Reading Prize for Look, reads from her book and then participates in a Q&A session with the audience. A book sale and signing follow the reading.

The event is free and open to all, but please register. Parking is available for a fee in the West Broad Street, West Main Street and West Cary Street parking decks. For special accommodations, or to register offline, please contact the VCU Libraries Events Office at (804) 828-0593.

About the Author

Solmaz Sharif was born in Istanbul to Iranian parents. She holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley and New York University. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, jubilat, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Witness and others and has been recognized with a "Discovery" Boston Review Poetry Prize, scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a winter fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, an NEA fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship. She has most recently been selected to receive a 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award as well as a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. She is a former managing director of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and she is currently a lecturer at Stanford University. Her first poetry collection, Look, published by Graywolf Press in 2016, was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Sponsors

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

Image: Solmaz Sharif, by Arash Saedinia/ View from the window at Le Gras, by Nicéphore Niépce