Steven Leyva
April 21 @ 7:00 pm - April 24 @ 8:00 pm
Order The Opposite of Cruelty
Magic City Books is excited to welcome Steven Leyva for a free, in-store event on Monday, April 21 to celebrate his book, The Opposite of Cruelty. This event will take place in the Algonquin Room at Magic City Books, 221 E. Archer Street in the Tulsa Arts District.
“Steven Leyva’s The Opposite of Cruelty reads like 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.’ Witty, ambitious, and formally inventive, The Opposite of Cruelty is a beautiful book.” –Jericho Brown, The Tradition, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Steven will be joined in conversation by Quraysh Ali Lansana, author of over 20 books in poetry, nonfiction and children’s literature. Lansana is Applied Professor of English/Creative Writing & Media Studies at the University of Tulsa, where he also serves as Director of the African American Studies program and the TU Media Lab. He is an alumnus of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship and was formerly a Lecturer in Africana Studies at Oklahoma State University-Tulsa where he also served as Director of the Center for Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation.
The Opposite of Cruelty will be published by Blair on March 4, 2025 and available for sale at Magic City Books. You can purchase a copy in-store or online at: https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/the-opposite-of-cruelty-steven-leyva/3245
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.”
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.
