Noah Stetzer

“Friends of Writers is pleased to announce the winners of the 2017 Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipend: Rose Skelton in Fiction for HOMESCAR, and Noah Stetzer in Poetry for BOYS GUIDE TO DANGER & HOUSEWORK . Each winner receives $4000. The judge in fiction was Peter Ho Davies.  The judge in poetry was Allison Joseph.”

What a thrill to be selected for the Larry Levis Stipend for Poetry! When I first enrolled in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College all I knew was that I didn’t know a whole lot.  Again and again, I was fortunate to work with powerful teacher-poets: Van Jordan, C. Dale Young, Alan Shapiro, and Jennifer Grotz.  Along with my four MFA mentors, other impressive faculty members taught me so much through their lectures, classes, workshops, and readings. 

I am grateful for the teachers who keep helping me along the way: teachers inside and outside the various classrooms I’ve been in over the years: from the UVA/Young Writers Workshop, through Univ of Pittsburgh undergrad, to the Warren Wilson low-res program. And now in the post-grad world it is the talented work of other poets and writers, living and dead, that continues to guide and direct my own work.  

So much I don’t know, so much still to find out.

Thank you to Friends of Writers for this unbelievable show of support!

Larry Levis (1946-1996; pictured above) was an award-winning poet who wrote six books of poetry during his lifetime. His collection, Elegy, was published posthumously. A Selected Poems was published in 2000. The Darkening Trapeze, a collection of last poems, was published in 2016. Levis was a much-beloved member of the faculty at the MFA Program for Writers, cherished as much for his incisive mind as for the care and attention he gave to his students