Awards and Honors
The Klein Professorship
Education
M.F.A., University of Baltimore
B.S., Oral Roberts University
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, Poetry, and Best American Poetry 2020. He is a Cave Canem fellow, the winner of the 2012 Cobalt Review Poetry Prize, 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. He is the author of The Opposite of Cruelty by Blair Publishing. For five years, he served as Little Patuxent Review’s head editor, publishing creative writing and visual art from the Mid-Atlantic region and beyond. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an associate professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design, and from 2021-2023 he held the Klein Professorship in Literature and Writing. In 202O, He was the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society’s (HoCoPoLitSo) Writer-in-Residence, and in 2019 he was recognized with the Yale Gordon College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award. He previously taught in Baltimore City public schools as a high school English teacher. As a fan of both comic book and otaku culture, Steven can often be found at various “cons” around the Baltimore and Washington, D.C. metro areas, and writes an ongoing column called Nerd Volta for the Washington Independent Review of Books.
Poetry and Black Diaspora Poetics, Anime and Animation Media Studies, Creative Writing Pedagogy, Pop Culture Studies, Poetry and Public Memory
Poetry & Poetics, Media Studies (with a focus on pop-culture, comics, anime and afro-futurism), American Literature
Books
Leyva, S. (2025). The Opposite of Cruelty. Blair. 80.
Leyva, S. (2020). The Understudy's Handbook. Washington Writer's Publishing House.
Refereed Journal Articles
Leyva, S., & Keohane, J. (2024). “Hope and History Rhyme": Poetry as Public Memory. The Hopkins Review. 17(1),
Conference Proceedings
Winik, M., & Leyva, S. (2024). The Life Changing Power of Memoir.
Book Reviews
Leyva, S. (2024). On Poetry: February 2024. Washington Independent Review of Books.
Leyva, S. (2020). A Phantom Jab. Washington Independent Review of Books.
Keohane, J., & Leyva, S. "Poetry and Public Memory," The Writers' Center, Bethesda, MD. (2025).
Keohane, J., & Leyva, S. Launch of the Hopkins Review’s Collective/Lyric I Folio, ""Hope and History Rhyme": Poetry as Public Memory," The Hopkins Review, Baltimore, MD. (2025).
Lawson, L., Leyva, S., Manick, C., Seibles, T., & Cross Davis, T. AWP, "The Future of Black: The Advent of 21st-Century Second-Wave Afrofuturism Poetry," Association of Writers and Writing Programs, Philadelphia. (2022).
Keohane, J., Leyva, S., & Ross, J. "Poetry as Public Memory," Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, Lancaster, PA. (2021).
Keohane, J., Leyva, S., & Ross, J. "Poetry as Public Memory," Ivy Bookstore, Baltimore, MD. (2021).
The A.V. Club: Contributed to an article titled "There’s something about Selina: Why Catwoman still tempts Batman after all these years".
The article quotes me heavily as subject matter expert while discussing from Batman '66 to The Dark Knight Rises, an examination of the common link between on-screen Catwomen (2022).
"Poetry as Public Memory" (On-Going)
We are working on a much larger-scale project including a potential database of the intersection between public memorializing and poetry.