Description

Elisa Gonzalez, the 2024 Levis Reading Prize winner, will read from for her poetry collection Grand Tour.

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. 

Grand Tour, Gonzalez’s debut full-length poetry collection, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2023 and was named one of the best books of that year by The New Yorker. Gonzalez’s individual poems have been published in The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and other publications. A graduate of Yale University and the New York University MFA program, Gonzalez has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Rolex Foundation, and the U.S. Fulbright Program. She is also the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Whiting Award. FSG will also bring out her novel, The Awakenings, and a nonfiction book, Strangers on Earth.

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 Now. 

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.