02/09/2024
NEWS: Fresno State’s Master of Fine Arts Program in creative writing announced Southern California author William Archila has won the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry book contest, selected by Douglas Kearney. The prize includes a $2,000 award and publication of his poetry collection, “S is For.”
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.
Archila’s “The Gravedigger’s Archaeology” (2015) won the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize and “The Art of Exile” (Bilingual Review Press, 2009) won an International Latino Book Award. He was awarded the 2023 Jack Hazard fellowship and the Alan Collins Scholarship at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is a PEN Center USA West Emerging Voices fellow. He lives in Los Angeles, on Tongva land.
Archila has been published in Poetry Magazine, the American Poetry Review, AGNl, Copper Nickel, Southern Indiana Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Missouri Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and the anthologies “The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext,” “Theatre Under My Skin: Contemporary Salvadoran Poetry,” and “The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States.” He has work forthcoming in the Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Indiana Review, Salamander and Guesthouse.
Kearney wrote of Archila's winning manuscript:
“Searing — not merely how I’d describe William Archila’s gaze at the desperation and depredation attendant in power’s abuse, the violence do***ng 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.”
Kearney also noted four manuscripts as contest finalists:
“Bluff” by Michal ‘MJ’ Jones.
“Desahógate” by Gisselle Yepes.
“Within Sky Kissing God” by Ayesha Raees.
“Bodypolitic” by Aerik Francis.
