By Gregory Donovan
VCU Department of English

Weijia Pan has won the 2025 Levis Reading Prize for his debut full-length poetry collection, “Motherlands.” The prize is awarded annually for the best first or second book of poetry published in the previous calendar year, and the winner is chosen by the MFA in Creative Writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University. The prize honors the memory of poet Larry Levis, who was a VCU faculty member at the time of his death in 1996.

Pan will receive an award of $5,000 and will give a reading from his work on Sept. 25 at 7 p.m. in the James Branch Cabell Library Lecture Hall on the VCU campus, scheduled as a hybrid event held both in person and streaming online.

Pan 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, and he is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

“Motherlands” was chosen by Louise Glück for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and published by Milkweed Editions in 2024. The collection has been lauded for the clear and poignant ways it combines the personal and the political – in powerful stories of Pan’s family and his childhood past in China as well as his present life in the United States, along with homage given to both ancient and contemporary poets and poetry.

Pan’s work encompasses migration and memory, warfare and wisdom, in a book that Publisher’s Weekly said creates “unexpected juxtapositions as he investigates displacement, selfhood and heritage.” Sarah Lynn Eastler, in the Southern Review of Books, noted that in “Motherlands,” Pan “tackles politics on a personal level” and creates living histories revealing “truths that pack a visceral punch.” She added that Pan explores memories of his family in post-Maoist China while stuck an ocean away during the COVID-19 pandemic, and his charismatic language forges “an intensity maintained from the start to finish that made me feel transformed.”

In winning the Levis Reading Prize, Pan joins a list of celebrated recipients – including Elisa Gonzalez for “Grand Tour,” Corey Van Landingham for “Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens,” Ilya Kaminsky for “Deaf Republic,” Jenny Xie for “Eye Level,” Kaveh Akbar for “Calling a Wolf a Wolf” and Solmaz Sharif for “Look” – since the award’s debut in 1998.

The upcoming event is presented by the MFA in Creative Writing program in the VCU Department of English and by VCU Libraries, with additional support from the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences and the family of Larry Levis.

For further information, visit the prize website, call 804-828-1329, or contact Matt Schroeder, 2025 Levis Reading Prize coordinator, at levis@vcu.edu, or Gregory Donovan, director of the Levis Reading Prize, at gdonovan@vcu.edu.