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Weijia Pan is the winner of the 2025 Levis Reading Prize for his debut poetry collection, Motherlands.
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.
Pan is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He is a poet and translator from Shanghai, China, whose poems have appeared in AGNI, Cincinnati Review, Georgia Review, Poetry Daily and elsewhere. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry from the University of Houston, where he was a winner of the Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry.
Motherlands was also chosen by Louise Glück for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and was published by Milkweed Editions in 2024.
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.
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.