Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Kaveh Akbar’s first full-length poetry collection, has been awarded the annual Levis Reading Prize. Honoring the memory of poet Larry Levis, the Levis Prize is bestowed upon the best first or second poetry collection each calendar year by the Department of English and MFA in Creative Writing program of Virginia Commonwealth University.

Akbar, a screener for AWP’s 2018 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, will receive an honorarium of $5,000 and will give a reading from Calling a Wolf a Wolf at VCU on October 8, 2018 at the James Branch Cabell Library.

Published last year by Alice James Books, Calling a Wolf a Wolf has also received a 2018 First Horizon Award, a 2017 Julie Suk Award, and it was selected by National Public Radio for the Book Concierge Guide to 2017’s Great Reads. In The Yale Review, poet and critic Steph Burt wrote, “Akbar has what every poet needs: the power to make, from emotions that others have felt, memorable language that nobody has assembled before.”

Akbar is also the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2016 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, The Best American Poetry and many other publications.

Currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Purdue University, Akbar now joins an illustrious group of past recipients including Solmaz Sharif, Rickey Laurentiis, Sandra Lim, and Roger Reeves.

Image Credit: Hieu Minh Nguyen