For each reading in this series called Poetry Now and Next
as you probably know by now, we've
asked an established writer to choose--
to choose an emerging writer to join them in a reading.
For this evening's reading, Louise Glück chose Dana Levin.
Dana is a rising star in American Letters.
Just today we were privileged to witness this.
The phone call came from the Academy--
American Academy of Arts and Letters
awarding Dana a-- awarding Dana the prize for her first book
of poems, the book called In the Surgical Theatre,
a truly an amazing achievement.
And one that will set her on a path for three years to come I
think.
Dana is a product of the Southwest,
she comes from Lancaster, California
a town in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
And from whence she proceeded probably not surprisingly
to New York City, where she went to New York University
and graduated in 1992 with a degree in creative writing.
Two years ago, she received a Pushcart Prize for poetry
and last year, won a fellowship from the National Endowment
for the Arts.
Dana has done residencies at the Vermont Art Studio
and at New Cross foundation, which
is a residency program out in enormous space in Wyoming.
She now teaches poetry writing and occasionally
modern American literature, Dos Pasos not Fitzgerald
we learned today at the college in Santa Fe.
Levin's first book, as I said in the title,
In the Surgical Theatre, also won the American Poetry
Review/Honickman Prize.
And the judge for that competition
was Louise Glück, who is also here tonight.
Glück wrote on encountering that manuscript,
"current American literary life being what it is:
a well-documented and scrutinized arena,
the audience made up almost entirely
of practitioners, a little trail from the MFA
programs through the multiple journals,
it is rare to encounter so substantially
and for the first time so mature a gift."
Glück noted the rich ambiguity and the animating fury of In
the Surgical Theatre and said, "what an amazing debut:
sensuous, compassionate, violent, extravagant."
We're pleased to present a potent new voice
in American poetry and a Western one at that, please welcome,
Dana Levin.
[APPLAUSE]