Joanna Fuhrman: DATA MIND and Steven Leyva: THE OPPOSITE OF CRUELTY

You’re invited to an evening of poetry at Bird in Hand celebrating two poets with recent collections: Joanna Fuhrman and Steven Leyva!

Joanna Fuhrman’s collection, DATA MIND, situates itself in her generation who entered the digital age as adults, with optimism about the possibilities it would bring for community building. In the poems, she lets herself fall into the internet wormhole of the conflicting realities they found.

Steven Leyva’s collection THE OPPOSITE OF CRUELTY renders beauty through a Black man’s lens in a post-pandemic world populated with superheroes and characters from ancient mythology.

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of seven poetry books, including To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press 2021) and newly released Data Mind (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press 2024.). Her poems have appeared on the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, The Slowdown podcast and in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. An Assistant Teaching Professor in creative writing at Rutgers University, she first published in Hanging Loose Magazine as a teenager and became a co-editor in 2022.

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.