THE LEVERTOV AWARD
The Denise Levertov Award is given annually to an artist, musician, or writer whose work exemplifies a serious and sustained engagement with faith. Recent recipients include Joy Harjo, Rowan Williams, Marilyn Nelson, and Carolyn Forché.
When the award ceremony was brought to Fairfield University in 2025, I was tasked with creating a new design identity for the award. The team wanted something chic and East-Coast-y that reflects the spirit of the award and its namesake. With that in mind, I wanted my design:
To reference the modernist architecture dotting the coast of New York, Fairfield County, and New Haven—especially that of Marcel Breuer and Philip Johnson.
To highlight lev and tov—two evocative Hebrew words (“heart” and “good”, in the richest, fullest senses)—that resonate with both Levertov’s own work and the works prized by the award.
To capture the sparseness that marks Levertov's poetry and faith. In The Stream & The Sapphire, Levertov’s poems on religious themes, the austerity of some of her psalmic poems is striking, featuring blocks of text tightly justified but scattered across a page overwhelmed by negative space. I always like profuse negative space—in both poetry and design—though I also find it to be representative of the dynamics of faith: it’s the animated space between doubt and certainty that Levertov’s poetry inhabits and that her award celebrates.
