Ohio author wins 2024 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry

Fresno State’s Master of Fine Arts Program in creative writing announced Ohio author Amanda Hodes won the 2024 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry book contest, which includes a $2,000 award and publication of her debut poetry collection, “Into the Into of Earth Itself.”

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.

The Levine Prize is awarded in partnership with New York-based Black Lawrence Press, which has published contemporary works of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction by new, emerging and established authors since 2004.

Levine Prize final judge Diana Khoi Nguyen — a poet, multimedia artist, National Book Award finalist and MacDowell and Kundiman fellow — chose Hodes’ manuscript as the winner. There were 763 submissions. Nguyen wrote of the winning entry:

“Astonished, dumbfounded, horrified and agape at this symphonic opus which documents two sites of ecological disaster: Centralia, Pa., a bulldozed near-ghost town where a coal mine fire has been burning underground since 1962, and Palmerton, Pa. just an hour away, ‘one of the largest Superfund sites of the east, home’ to the speaker.”

The judge said “Into the Into of Earth Itself” has an ancestral energy of Muriel Rukeyser behind it, with nods to the documentary poetics of Layli Long Soldier and Anthony Cody, the personal-political confrontations of Solmaz Sharif, and the syntaxes of Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, jos charles and Harryette Mullen.

“Amanda Hodes singularly emerges with her own alchemical lyric of excavation that exposes the corporate exploitation of land, exploitative and dangerous ‘dark tourism’ and the extracted innocence of girls,” Nguyen said. “The book aptly quotes ecofeminist scholar Vandana Shiva: this is ‘a culture of rape — rape of the Earth, of local self-reliant economies, of women.’ Here, the mined corpus is that of the exploiters, of exploitation itself. This is a searing indictment for our times.”

Nguyen also noted one manuscript as a contest finalist: “A White Horse Is Not a Horse,” by Angelo Mao.

Hodes is a writer and new media artist who currently teaches creative writing at Oberlin College & Conservatory in Ohio. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, [PANK], Pleiades, AMBIT, West Branch, Interim Poetics, DIAGRAM, the Academy of American Poets website, Quarterly West and elsewhere.

As an artist, she is interested in sound installation as a route to an embodied, spatial poetics. Her new media work has been exhibited in venues such as the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, Torpedo Factory, Abington Arts Center, Hirshhorn Sound Scene Festival, Ammerman Center for Arts & Technology, AUDIRE, University of Kent and Dartington International Music Festival.

Hodes holds an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Tech and master’s degree in creative writing (poetry) from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. She grew up in Pennsylvania.

The Philip Levine Prize for Poetry is an annual national book contest open to all poets, except current or former students or faculty of Fresno State. Vang coordinates the contest as part of the university’s English 242 graduate course, “Literary Editing and Publishing,” which provides students with hands-on professional experience in the publishing field. The contest offers a $2,000 prize plus publication and distribution by Black Lawrence Press.