Steven Leyva
associate professor
Klein Family School of Communications Design
Contact Information:
Phone: 410.837.6258
E-mail: sleyva@ubalt.edu
M.F.A., University of Baltimore
B.S., Oral Roberts University
As a working poet interested in the intersections of history, race, and performance, my work inside and outside the classroom contributes to the ongoing conversations in American arts and letters. In my poems I write on a variety of overlapping topics. I write about places of personal and historical significance, like my hometown of New Orleans. I write about the conceptual strain of being prepared for certain societal roles but not allowed to “play” those roles. I write about multi-ethic identity as a stage for reframing racial histories. I teach students in the MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts program how to synthesize what Walt Whitman calls the “multitudes” contained within their identities, histories, and interests.
I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. My poems have appeared in 2 Bridges Review, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, Vinyl, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2020. I am 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.
I am a literary columnist at Washington Independent Review of Books, where I write NERD VOLTA, a column about what literary artists can learn from nerd culture. My article “Sequential Imagination: Comic-book panel, the stanza, and time” is an example of how the column takes an interdisciplinary approach to poetics.
I teach a popular class ENGL/CMAT 333: The Evolution of Batman, which continues to bring media attention to the College of Arts and Sciences at The University of Baltimore, and generated an invitation to present at an academic conference on pop culture studies. Watch the short video below to learn more about the class.