Larry Levis's (1946 - 1996)  first volume of poems, Wrecking Crew, won the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum in 1971 and was published in 1972. His second collection, The Afterlife, was the 1976 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and published in 1977. In 1981, The Dollmaker’s Ghost was selected by Stanley Kunitz as a winner in the National Poetry Series. Levis’s fourth collection, Winter Stars, appeared in 1985, and his fifth book, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, in 1991. He first taught at the University of Missouri (1974–1983), then at the University of Utah (1984–1994), where he served as Director of Creative Writing. He began teaching as professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1992 and was living in Richmond, Virginia, at the time of his death from a heart attack on May 8, 1996, at the age of forty-nine. Elegy, a posthumous collection of poetry edited by Philip Levine, was published in 1997. The Selected Levis, edited by David St. John, appeared in 2000. The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems, edited by David St. John, has been published by Graywolf Press.