was a Fulbright Lecturer in Yugoslavia in 1988. From 1992 until his death from a heart attack in 1996, Levis was the Senior Poet and a Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. During this period of time he also taught at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. Awards and recognition By the late 1960s, Levis had written many of the poems that would appear in his first book, Wrecking Crew (1972), which won the 1971 U. S. Award of the International Poetry Forum, and included publication in the Pitt Poetry Series by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The Academy of American Poets named his second book, The Afterlife (1976) as a Lamont Poetry Selection. His third book of poems, The Dollmaker's Ghost, was selected by Stanley Kunitz as the winner of the Open Competition of the National Poetry Series in 1981. Other awards included a YM-YWHA Discovery award, three fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a 1982 Guggenheim Fellowship. Levis’s poems are often included in many anthologies such as American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006) Personal life Levis was married three times. His second wife was Marcia Southwick, a fellow poet, whom he married on March 15, 1975. David St. John served as best man. Together the couple had a son, Nicholas Southwick Levis (b.1978). They were together until the early 1980s, and their marriage eventually ended in divorce. Southwick later married Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, in 1992. Levis was married to his first wife, Barbara Campbell, from 1969 to 1973. His third wife was Mary Jane Hale, who he was married to from 1989 to 1990. Along with his professional and artistic acclaim, Levis struggled with depression, alcohol and drug use throughout his life. In part, the 2016 documentary film about Levis, A Late Style of Fire, explores the “risks and sacrifices that are necessary to live the life of an artist.” The film shows Levis constantly wrestling with the “dark side” of artistic creation. This included various self-destructive and ”bad boy” impulses. Death Levis died of cardiac arrest triggered by a cocaine overdose, in Richmond, Virginia on May 8, 1996, at the age of 49. Legacy The Levis Reading Prize is awarded each year by the Department of English and its MFA in Creative Writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). The prize is given