Weijia Pan, the 2025 Levis Reading Prize winner, will read from his 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.

Weijia 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.

The event is free and open to all and will be held in person but will also be live streamed through Zoom.

Registration is required. (Link to come)