Steven Leyva: THE OPPOSITE OF CRUELTY (with Sandra Beasley)

You're invited to an evening with beloved Baltimore poet Steven Leyva in celebration of his new collection of poetry, The Opposite of Cruelty! This collection renders beauty through a Black man's lens in a post-pandemic world populated with superheroes and characters from ancient mythology. We know many of you loved Steven's first collection, The Understudy's Handbook, and can say with certainty that this second book will fortify you in much the same way.

Steven will be joined by Sandra Beasley, author of four poetry collections including Made to Explode.

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

Sandra Beasley is the author of four poetry collections—Made to Explode, winner of a Housatonic Book Award; Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Theories of Falling, which won the New Issues Poetry Prize—as well as Don’t K*ll the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir and cultural history of food allergies. She edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. Honors for her work include a 2015 NEA fellowship, and six DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities fellowships. She lives in Washington, D.C., and serves as the poetry editor for Blair, a literary press based in North Carolina.

Host or Publisher The Ivy Bookshop