Fresno State will host Levine Prize-winning poet

Lynn Aarti Chandhok of Brooklyn, N.Y., whose “The View from Zero Bridge” won the 2006 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry and has recently garnered national attention, will read from her collection at 7 p.m. Friday, Feb. 22, at California State University, Fresno.

Chandhok’s reading, a reception and book signing are planned at the Alice Peters Auditorium in the University Center. The event is free and open to the public.

“The View from Zero Bridge,” her first book, was published in October by Anhinga Press, a prestigious poetry publisher. The nonprofit Small Press Distribution in December reported the volume in the top 10 poetry sellers nationwide in December.

The Master of Fine Arts program at California State University, Fresno sponsors the Levine award, which honors professor emeritus Philip Levine, a founder of Fresno State’s poetry writing program and the 1995 Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry. The Levine prize includes a $1,500 award and publication.

Chandhok is a Pittsburgh, Pa., native, who spent summers in Kashmir with her father’s family. She and her husband moved to Brooklyn in 1990, and since then Chandhok has worked as a high school English teacher and freelance writer. She began writing poetry in 1999.

Dr. Corrinne Clegg Hales, an English professor at Fresno State, who is in charge of this year’s Levine Prize program, wrote the following about Chandhok’s debut book for Amazon.com:

“This is a poetry that embraces the problem of distance – geographical,chronological, religious, and cultural – and the book gathers quiet force as it weaves between worlds as seemingly distant as Kashmir and Brooklyn, childhood and parenthood, sensuality and intellect, science and tradition. It’s a delight to read a new book of poems that not only sings with a beautiful voice, but sings with remarkable wisdom, and sings to the heart.”