Larry Patrick Levis (September 30, 1946 – May 8, 1996) was an American poet and teacher who published five books of poetry during his lifetime.
[6] ”The young Levis grew up driving a tractor, picking grapes, and pruning vines in Selma, California, a small fruit-growing town in the San Joaquin Valley.
He also remembered hanging out in the local billiards parlor on Selma's East Front Street, across from the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks.”[7]Levis earned a bachelor's degree from Fresno State College in 1968, where he had studied under Philip Levine.
[8] One of Levis's classmates at that time, poet Stephen Dunn, later wrote about their 1969-70 experience at Syracuse:"We had come to study with Philip Booth, Donald Justice, W.D.
[13] From 1992 until his death from a heart attack in 1996, Levis was the Senior Poet and a Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University.
His third book of poems, The Dollmaker's Ghost, was selected by Stanley Kunitz as the winner of the Open Competition of the National Poetry Series in 1981.
The Levis Reading Prize is awarded each year by the Department of English and its MFA in Creative Writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU).
The prize is given annually in the name of the late Larry Levis for the best first or second book of poetry published in the previous calendar year.
[19] Essays and articles about Levis are featured each year in Blackbird, an online journal of literature and the arts published by VCU.
Two previously unpublished poems (eventually collected in The Darkening Trapeze) appeared in The Best American Poetry book series in 2014 and 2016, two decades after his death.