Poetry Reading with Steven Leyva & Valzhyna Mort

Join us for a reading and conversation with poets Steven Leyva and Valzhyna Mort.

About The Opposite of Cruelty:

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.”

About Music for the Dead and Resurrected:

With shocking, unforgettable lyric force, Valzhyna Mort’s Music for the Dead and Resurrected confronts the legacy of violent death in one family in Belarus. In these letters to the dead, the poet asks: How do we mourn after a century of propaganda? Can private stories challenge the collective power of Soviet and American historical mythology?

Mort traces a route of devastation from the Chernobyl fallout and a school system controlled by ideology to the Soviet labor camps and the massacres of World War II. While musical form serves as a safe house for the poet’s voice, old trees speak to her as the only remaining witnesses, hosts to both radiation and memory.

Valzhyna Mort, born in Belarus and now living in the United States, conjures a searing, hallucinogenic ritual of rhythmic remembrance in a world where appeals to virtue and justice have irrevocably failed.

About the Poets:
Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans and raised in Houston, Texas. He is a Cave Canem fellow, author of The Understudy’s Handbook, which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize, and author of The Opposite of Cruelty. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an associate professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.

Read "A Poem Avoiding Its Own Tour of Force" by Steven Leyva.
Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk in 1981 and moved to the USA in 2005. Music for the Dead and Resurrected first came out with Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2020 and was the winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the UNT Rilke Prize. Mort has been honored with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lannan Foundation, among others. Mort teaches creative writing at Cornell University and writes in English and Belarusian. Photo of Valzhyna Mort credit © Marco Giugliarelli for the Civitella Ranieri Foundation 2023.

Read "Ars Poetica" by Valzhyna Mort.

About the Program:

• Doors will open to registered attendees at 2:00 pm.
• A local bookseller will be on-site and have books available for purchase.
• Free parking vouchers are available to program attendees who park at the Franklin Street Garage (15 W. Franklin Street). Ask Pratt event staff for your parking voucher prior to or after the program.
• There is no registration required for virtual attendance, simply visit the Enoch Pratt Free Library's Facebook or Youtube page.

Host or Publisher Enoch Pratt Free Library