David Samuel Levinson Named 2011 Marguerite and Lamar Smith Writing Fellow

Columbus State University’s Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians is pleased to announce fiction-writer David Samuel Levinson as the 2011 Lamar and Marguerite Smith Writing Fellow. Levinson will work and reside this fall in the Columbus, GA, childhood home of celebrated American writer Carson McCullers. He is the sixth recipient of this competitive fellowship named for McCullers’ parents and inspired by McCullers’ experiences at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and the Yaddo Arts Colony in Saratoga Springs, NY.

Levinson received his undergraduate degree from Columbia University and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School in New York. He served as the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania and has taught creative writing at The George Washington University, NYU, and the University of Texas at Austin. Levinson has also been awarded fellowships by Ledig House in New York, by the Jentel Foundation in Wyoming, the Santa Fe Art Institute, and Yaddo (where Carson McCullers also once visited as writer-in-residence).

Levinson has published work in The Atlantic Monthly, West Branch, Slush Pile, Prairie Schooner, and The Brooklyn Review and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize several times. He has also published one collection of short stories, Most of us Are Here Against Our Will, and his first novel, Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence, is due out from Algonquin Books in 2012. Writer Bret Easton Ellis has praised his short story collection as “direct, emotional and compulsively readable” and “timeless and essential.” While Levinson now resides in New York, the stories in his collection are mostly set in his hometown of San Antonio, Texas, and engage with complex questions about love, loss, family, and personal relationships. His forthcoming novel, Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence, continues to investigate these themes in the setting of a small New York college town. While in residence at the Smith-McCullers House, Levinson plans to continue work on his second novel, Notes on an American Sundown, also set in small-town New York.  While visiting, Levinson will also give a public reading (date to be announced).

To learn more about Levinson, visit his website: http://david-levinson.com/ .