The Writer’s Center welcomes poets Steven Leyva and Holly Karapetkova for a reading and discussion to celebrate their new books.
Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 2 Bridges Review, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, Vinyl, 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 March 2025. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an associate professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.
A winner of the 2024 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize for Dear Empire, Holly Karapetkova is Poet Laureate Emerita of Arlington, Virginia, and a recipient of a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship for her work with young poets. Her poetry, prose, and translations have appeared widely in print and online. She is the author of two previous books of poetry, Towline, winner of the Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize from Cloudbank Books, and Words We Might One Day Say, winner of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House Prize for Poetry. She lives in Arlington, Virginia, and teaches at Marymount University.
About Dear Empire
Holly Karapetkova’s Dear Empire is a winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize and a winner of the William Meredith Prize for Poetry.
“The poems of Holly Karapetkova do not ask for forgiveness. They willingly tackle issues of race and explore ideas associated with the anatomy of whiteness. Here is a collection that is personal as well as historical. Karapetkova writes with a contagious honesty. Her poems describe an American mirror we should not turn away from. Karapetkova’s biblical references are a reminder that there is always goodness at the center of her work.”
—E. Ethelbert Miller, writer and literary activist, 2024 Grammy Nominee for Spoken Word and Poetry
“In Dear Empire, it is history that Holly Karapetkova addresses—and would have us address. History is a cabinet in a great room filled with mirrors and relics, some made “of ivory, cow teeth, slave teeth.” It is thus the story of slavery, lynching, cyclical dispossessions. And history is the story of what happened, regardless of who was or wasn’t there, as told by those with the power to circulate narratives. If only we could see clear through each other, the poet writes. But as her deft and incisive poems show, history is also the story of survival, sacrifice, and devotion; of how we are always running toward that light which can’t be bought or stolen.”
—Luisa A. Igloria, author Caulbearer and Maps for Migrants and Ghosts
About The Opposite of Cruelty
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.”
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