Humanities in the Village, ft. Dora Malech and Steven Leyva: TRYING X TRYING

Presenting Humanities in the Village, an event series in partnership with the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University, which aims to make scholarship publicly accessible.

For this January edition– the first of 2026– we are thrilled to welcome Dora Malech in celebration of her new poetry collection TRYING X TRYING, out this year from Carnegie-Mellon University Press. Steven Leyva joins Malech in conversation about her new collection, which dissects the language of our times and turns over the familiar phrases of politics, parenthood, and pandemic to reveal what lies beneath. Through playing with the double meaning of “trying” as both perseverance and reproductive struggle, these poems navigate public and private spheres and interrogate the words we use to make sense of uncertainty and belief.

Whether it’s your first time at the series or you’ve been attending for years, we hope you’ll join us to usher this exciting new book into the world!

Order TRYING X TRYING here.

Dora Malech’s most recent books of poetry are Trying × Trying (2025), and Flourish (2020), both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry, and her honors include an Amy Clampitt Residency Award, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, a Writing Residency Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and a Mary Sawyers Baker Prize. She lives in Baltimore, where she is a professor and department chair in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and the editor in chief of The Hopkins Review.

Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in Smartish Pace, Scalawag, Poetry, 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 Opposite of Cruelty, was published by Blair Publishing in Spring 2025. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an associate professor, and co-director of the Klein Family Center of Communications Design.