The Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipend

2023-24 Levis prize guidelines


 

Two Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipends, one in fiction and one in poetry, are given to support graduates of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers who are completing first books. Each 2023-24 award will be made to a writer in the amount of $5,000. Judges will be announced with the winning manuscripts.

Eligibility

The Levis Stipends are open only to alumni who have not yet published a full-length collection in the selected genre in a standard edition. A standard edition is defined as 150 or more pages in a print run of 1500 or more copies for fiction, and as 48 or more pages in a print run of 500 or more copies for poetry. Entrants to the competition must hold the MFA degree from Warren Wilson College. All alumni are eligible.

 


Guidelines

  1. All submissions must be made via Submission Manager.  An entry fee of $30 is required to process the application.
  2. Include in your application a statement regarding how the award will be used, projected completion date of the book manuscript, and a list of publication credits.  Your name should not appear anywhere in this statement.
  3. Include a 40-page fiction manuscript or 20-page poetry manuscript. Document margins should be at least one inch; text should be in an easily readable 12-point typeface.  Because your statement and list of publications will be included in the same packet (only one document may be attached to your submission), your submitted pages will likely be beyond 40 or 20 pages respectively, and this is fine. Manuscripts are judged blindly; your name should not appear anywhere on your manuscript, to include your statement and list of publications.  If it does, your application will be disqualified and removed from consideration.
  4. Submit your entry via Submission Manager.  Do not use your name in the Submission Manager project title or filename.  (Your project title can be either the title of your manuscript or something like “Levis poetry manuscript.”)  Your cover letter should appear before the submitted manuscript.  Label your attachment “manuscript.”  It must be submitted as a .doc or .docx file (.pdfs may likely be too large to attach).

Deadlines

  • DEADLINE  Submissions will now be accepted until November 1, 2023 at 11:59 p.m..

Stipends will be awarded in Winter 2023.  Stipends are fully taxable under United States tax laws, and Friends of Writers must declare the awards to the Internal Revenue Service.  Taxes and payments of taxes are solely the responsibility of individual award winners. 

 

About Larry Levis


 

“I told no one, but the snows came, anyway.
They weren’t even serious about it, at first.
Then, they seem to say, if nothing happened,
Snow could say that, & almost entirely.”
                                           –Larry Levis, “Gossip in the Village”

Larry Levis (1946-1996) was an award-winning poet who wrote six books of poetry during his lifetime. His collection, Elegy, was published posthumously. A Selected Poems was published in 2000. The Darkening Trapeze, a collection of last poems, was published in 2016. Levis was a much-beloved member of the faculty at the MFA Program for Writers, cherished as much for his incisive mind as for the care and attention he gave to his students.

Any queries or requests for more information should be addressed to:

Nathan McClain

Levis Fellowship Administrator | nathan.mcclain@gmail.com