Steven Leyva in conversation with Cory Hutchinson-Reuss–The Opposite of Cruelty
Steven Leyva in conversation with Cory Hutchinson-Reuss–The Opposite of Cruelty
April 29 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Poet Steven Leyva will read from his newest collection of poems, The Opposite of Cruelty, and will be joined in conversation by fellow poet Cory Hutchinson-Reuss. “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” (blairpub.com). Bestselling poet Jericho Brown praises The Opposite of Cruelty as “a series of odes and vignettes praising the very fact of daily Black life. Each poem is careful to move that which is mundane to a position of praise from the right amount of salt necessary for making grits to worms who ‘perform their transubstantiation/through the fragile dark.'”
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.
Cory Hutchinson-Reuss is the author of Triptych, forthcoming from Milk & Cake Press in May 2025 and which is a collaborative chapbook of her poems as well as the visual art of Giselle Simón, which was published in 2022 as part of the Prompt Press Gallery Series. Her poetry and hybrid writings have appeared in LIT Magazine, antiphony journal, Cherry Tree, and elsewhere. Originally from Arkansas, she holds a PhD in English from the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City, where she teaches in both university and community settings. Cory also serves as Poetry Editor for Brink.