Fresno State’s Master of Fine Arts Program in creative writing announced Southern California author William Archila won the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry book contest, which includes a $2,000 award and publication of his poetry collection, “S is For.”
The creative writing program sponsors the national prize, which honors Levine, the late poet and Fresno State professor emeritus of English. Levine won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and he was the 2011 poet laureate of the United States.
Archila’s book will be the first to be published as part of the Levine Prize’s new partnership with Black Lawrence Press. A New York-based publisher of contemporary poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, Black Lawrence Press was founded in 2004 and has been an independent company since 2014.
Levine Prize final judge Douglas Kearney — a widely published poet, essayist, opera composer and McKnight Presidential Fellow — chose Archila’s manuscript as the winner. There were 736 submissions. Kearney wrote of the winning entry:
“Searing — not merely how I’d describe William Archila’s gaze at the desperation and depredation attendant in power’s abuse, the violence dogging the migrant, the slayings of those who stay. No, also, searing in the sense of that which burns a mark into a surface, how the poet’s prosody scorches language into the line, into the throat, into the air. Heat, here, that makes light, signal visible even from exile, even to a distracted North who may not/may only notice that ‘Yesterday a cutthroat carved a copper / who carved a cutthroat, 224 wounds / for the smallest of spoils.’ Archila tallies these wounds and those that set fire to the heart. Here, S is for searing, for song, for sorrow. S is for sunlit, for shot, for shattered. S is for sublime. Stunning. Staggering.”