POETRY READING
Joseph Ross
&
Steven Leyva
Wednesday, January 17, 2024 at 7:00 pm
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
(RSVP required)
The Arts Club welcomes Joseph Ross and Steven Leyva for a poetry reading and book release celebration for Joseph Ross's latest work, Crushed and Crowned. Both poets will read and then take questions from the audience. A reception and book signing will follow.
As stated by Philip Kolin, "These are amazing Jeremiah poems, lamenting, excoriating, praying for America when it is "being its worst." Not surprisingly, the first line of Ross's first poem about Black sanitation workers in Memphis,crushed by a garbage truck because they "were not allowed to sit where humans sit," is "Some days, America is a jaw/steel-toothed and filthy."
In another poem entitled "When Your Parents Are Both Deceased" Ross expresses emptiness in simple reverberating lines:
"I have become the son
of absence.
No hands hold me
to this earth."
Steven Leyva's spare, precise language is evident in this excerpt from the crown of sonnets, "Halo":
What is the opposite of cruelty?
We scrub our teeth with any comfort: coffee, laughter, an illuminated text.
If not comfort, then the common sense of beauty.
Joseph Ross is the author of five books of poetry: Crushed & Crowned (2023), Raising King (2020), Ache (2017), Gospel of Dust (2013) and Meeting Bone Man (2012). His poems appear in many anthologies and journals, including The New York Times Magazine, Xavier Review, The Langston Hughes Review, and The Los Angeles Times. He serves on the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. He teaches high school English and Creative Writing and writes regularly at www.JosephRoss.net.
Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in Smartish Pace, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, The Hopkins Review, 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 Common Sense of Beauty, is forthcoming from Blair Publishing in Spring 2025 Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an associate professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.
The reading will be followed by a reception and book signing.
Doors open at 6:30 pm and program will begin 7:00 pm.
Discounted parking available 2001 Pennsylvania Ave.
