Poetry Reading: The Opposite of Cruelty by Steven Leyva

Please help us celebrate the poetry collection by Steven Leyva, who will be joined by Tara Betts & Charif Shanahan.

Please note: This event is free to attend, but registration is requested. Masks are required for our in-person events.

Steven Leyva's second collection of poetry renders beauty through a Black man's lens in a post-pandemic world populated with superheroes and characters from ancient mythology.

In The Opposite of Cruelty, Steven Leyva's poems ask readers to see and remember beauty when the world seems to be in ruins, to notice and praise "the industrious cherry // trees budding despite a summer / full of bullets to come." For Leyva, beauty can be found in lineage and memory, in the heroes of the comics and TV shows he watched as a boy, in taking his children to the movies to see an Afro-Latino Spider-man on the big screen, and in doing so passing down that beauty, those means of survival. In these sonnets and urban pastorals you'll find Selena, UGK and Outkast, Storm, Static, and Batman, as well as Sisyphus, Medusa, Perseus, and Grendel. This weaving of modern culture and the ancient world calls attention to our need for stories, how heroes and villains take up residence inside us, how important it is to see one's self represented in art and film.

This book does not look away from life's hard and cruel moments, it simply dares to ask "What is the opposite of cruelty?" The answers: The beauty of a Black boy in his school picture, the beauty of one man's hand touching another man's face at the barber, the beauty of a family home or a memory of what it once was, "not a season of phantasmal peace, but what's left / when the world's terrors retreat."

Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in Smartish Pace, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, The Hopkins Review, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2020. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of the chapbook Low Parish and author of The Understudy’s Handbook which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers Publishing House. His second book of poems, The Opposite of Cruelty, is forthcoming from Blair Publishing in Spring 2025. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an associate professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.

Tara Betts is the author of Refuse to Disappear, Break the Habit, Arc & Hue. Betts teaches at DePaul University’s Peace Studies Program and serves as poetry editor for The Langston Hughes Review. Betts coedited The Beiging of America: Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century, an edition of Philippa Duke Schuyler's memoir Adventures in Black & White, and Carving Out Rights From Inside the Pr*son Industrial Complex. She is coediting Bop, Strut, and Dance, an anthology of Bop Poems with Afaa M. Weaver for Northwestern University Press. Her poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.

Charif Shanahan is the author of two collections of poetry: Trace Evidence: poems (Tin House, 2023), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and longlisted for the National Book Award; and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/SIU Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email [email protected] by no later than 14 days before the event. For other questions or access needs, please email [email protected].

Host or Publisher Women & Children First