The Howard County Youth Poet Laureate program, a new venture in partnership with the Office of County Executive Calvin Ball, the Howard County Arts Council, and the Howard County Poetry & Literature Society (HoCoPoLitSo), is pleased to announce the members of the Youth Poet Laureate panel: Naomi Ayala, Steven Leyva, and Joseph Ross.
Naomi Ayala is the author of three books of poetry – Wild Animals on the Moon (Curbstone Press); This Side of Early (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press); and Calling Home: Praise Songs and Incantations (Bilingual Press, University of Arizona). She is the translator of Luis Alberto Ambroggio’s La arqueología del viento/The Wind’s Archeology, and La sombra de la muerte/Death’s Shadow, a novel by His Excellency José Tomás Pérez, the Dominican Republic’s Ambassador to the United States. Naomi has translated and published poems by Lope de Vega as well as the film script for the documentary Every Child is Born a Poet: The Life and Work of Piri Thomas. Her most recent poems in English appear in Gargoyle, Barrelhouse, Poetry, Salamander, and DoveTales: Letters from the Self to the World. She has received artist fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts, U.S. Congressional Recognition for Community Service, and a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Legacy of Environmental Justice Award. www.naomiayala.com
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, 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 forthcoming in 2025 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.
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 publications including, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, Poet Lore, The Langston Hughes Review, and the 2022 anthology, WHERE WE STAND: Poems of Black Resilience. He has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and won the 2012 Pratt Library / Little Patuxent Review Poetry Prize for his poem “If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God.” Recently, Ross served as judge for the 2021 Ken Ebert Poetry Prize from Iris G. Press. He currently serves on the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. where he teaches English and Creative Writing. Ross writes regularly at www.JosephRoss.net.