By Jefferson Beavers | Photo by Matt Valentine | Read the full story on FresnoStateNews.com
The Fresno State Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing announced Texas author E.C. Belli has won the 2020 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry book contest, which includes a $2,000 award and publication of her second book, “A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep.”
The Creative Writing Program sponsors the national prize, which honors Levine, the late poet and Fresno State professor emeritus, a 1995 Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry and the 2011 poet laureate of the United States. The prize is awarded in partnership with Florida-based Anhinga Press, which has published poetry books since 1974.
Levine Prize final judge Cathy Park Hong, an award-winning poet, memoirist and professor at Rutgers University-Newark, chose Belli’s manuscript as the winner. There were 940 submissions. Hong wrote of the winning entry:
“E.C. Belli’s poems are magical. Her poems are intense lyrical distillates, capturing sorrow, or melancholy, or dreamy reverie through the alchemy of music that pulls at my heartstrings. Her poems are lullabies, lamentations, love songs, apostrophes to alter egos that praise the inclement weather of our interior moods. Whimsical, sultry and weighted with grief, ‘A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep’ is a collection of poems existing on a plane that is between waking and sleeping; it is a portrait of a beautiful and exquisitely perceptive subconscious.”
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The College of Arts and Humanities at Fresno State 