“safronia”/Photo: VAM Studio

avery r. young is a poet all the time, even in conversation. He’ll rhyme when he talks, or he’ll sing. He’ll hesitate in the middle of a sentence—waiting for the right words to come. There’s rhythm and melody in his speech, with percussive pops of laughter.

After decades of writing and performing poetry, the West Side native and interdisciplinary artist is taking on a new challenge—acting and singing in his own Afro-surrealist opera “safronia,” a tale of the Great Migration playing at the Lyric Opera April 17 and 18. Chicago’s first poet laureate says his new role is “the biggest job I’ve had to handle.”

“I can’t wait for people to hear it,” says young, who says that operagoers shouldn’t expect “chocolate-covered Mozart,” but music inspired by the Black traditions of gospel hymns, blues, funk and the call-and-response style of the Black church.

“Imagine Curtis Mayfield conducting Parliament Funkadelic…” young says. “It is definitely the music that you hear in your family’s kitchen or at a wedding reception… It just really has a driving beat to it. The times where it’s slow or dramatic, it’s dramatic in the sense of a dirge or a hymn, and not necessarily a proper aria… I hope that I wrote a piece that activates the body, not just engages people emotionally.”

young grew up in the Austin neighborhood, attending Mather High School and later graduating from Loyola University. He comes from a musical family—when he was little, he and his sister used to play church choir together, standing on the stairs in their basement apartment. But while he loves the choir and the altar calls, young says he was first inspired to write poetry by hearing ministers in the Baptist church.

“I was always fascinated with the sermon. That was the place where the singing and talking kind of happened at the same time. A lot of Baptist ministers—they sing and talk when they preach,” young says. He then sings: “And I hear-r-r-d, just the other day, that old man’s song… It was that listening to ministers sermonize stories in the Bible that fascinated me. I wanted to do what the minister was doing to people. I just found a way to do it through poetry.”

young had worked with the Lyric in 2021 for the pandemic-era production “Twilight: Gods,” a reimagining of Richard Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” performed in a parking garage. young wrote and performed poetic transitions for the critically acclaimed show. Then Lyric asked him if he had a story he wanted to see as an opera. He provided three ideas, and the story chosen was about the Great Migration of Black people from the South into Chicago. He has spent the last five years on the piece—“writing, conceiving, recording, workshopping and notating.”

avery r. young/Photo: John Shaw, Lyric Opera of Chicago

young says the story is loosely based on his grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ journey from Mississippi, and deals with the domestic terrorism that drove Black southerners from their homes. “I thought it was important to tell the story of the way in which and how the music and poetry of Black people in America are the elements of their resistance,” young says.

The story follows a family’s return to the South to bury their patriarch, baar jacob booker, on land they had been forced to leave. The action centers on baar’s daughter, safronia (played by Meagan McNeal) who wants to reclaim what was lost. (Like his own name, young chose that his characters’ names be in lowercase letters.)

young says that “safronia” is named for his own maternal grandmother, whom he had never met. He was raised by his great-aunt, Mary Booker. There’s also a Safronia in the Nina Simone song “Four Women.” He wanted to both honor his grandmother and “give mad props to Nina Simone.”

young says safronia in the opera is like Brunhilde in Wagner’s “Ring Cycle,” a strong, angry woman who wants to “tear it all up.”

“safronia’s a hot mess, in the true sense of all the heroines in operatic stories,” young says. “She gets to be mean and drunk and beautiful, and you know, not feel bad about it. So she’s like Brunhilde-point-five. Brunhilde was hot, she was like, ‘I’m going to tear it all up’ and that’s kind of safronia’s attitude. I’m just gonna lay my father’s ashes down, and then when I see these two men who, in her sense, led to her father’s demise, she’s gotta couple of hot ones for them!”

young plays the part of baar, based on a great-grandfather he’d never met, and finds acting to be a “very different experience,” not a part of his “muscle memory” like music and poetry are.

“But I had enough time with his sons and daughters to figure out what about them could have been him,” says young. “There are times when I hear myself sing that I hear my ancestors. I believe the key to putting my great-grandfather into my body is really trying to grasp the concept of how much he had to perform maleness, because I made the decision not to perform it. I’ve made more of a decision to be much more self-actualized and be the man that I’ve designed myself to be.”

He says his great-grandfather was trying to be successful and powerful, putting on a show of toughness, like someone pretending to be big and loud to scare off a bear in the woods. Young makes a bear’s growling noise—“GRAAAR!”

“This man made himself big, and it doesn’t do him any justice in the world of Jim Crow, ” young says. “It doesn’t matter in the world of Jim Crow.”

He sees parallels between that time and the current time in the United States, noting that social media has become a place of “barbarians.”

“There was a point in American history where you could blow up a church with children in it and be considered wrong for doing that…. Let me tell it. There’s no difference between ICE and mo-fos running around in white sheets and burning crosses… I think we’re just in a very dire situation, if kindness is considered [being on] the losing team. I’ve been inside countries where people have respect for Trump because he comes off powerful and strong. But for me, there’s no strength in power and tyranny. Tyranny is a power that is way more consuming than it is exalting. It’s just like in ‘The Lord of the Rings,’” young says, referring to the J.R.R. Tolkien novel.

young says that the worship of power and tyranny is “unfathomable” in the world of poetry, which he sees as still communal and in a sense religious. “I always call the Green Mill church,” says young, referring to the jazz club that hosts poetry slams, and where young started performing in the 1990s. “Because people are reading poetry, but they come there to worship, right? They come to congregate. They come there to share whatever is in their heart and imagination through poetry.” He calls poets and those who listen to poetry “essentially a community of people who consider other bodies, voices and experiences. This democracy we are living in right now doesn’t consider too many people outside of those in power.”

An educator, young says he wishes poetry would be taught differently in schools. Typically, students are assigned to read a poem and then made to answer questions about what they understood. “And that’s not how poetry should be taught at all. The first question after you read the poem is, ‘What do you see? What do you hear? What does this remind you of?’ A poem should never lead into answers as much as it should lead into more poetry. You don’t read a poem to find answers to some questions, you read a poem to inspire your life… If the curriculum had a different design and maybe a different destination, we would have a different means to teach poems and people would like poems more than they do.”

young says that as a “baby of James Baldwin and Richard Wright,” he has long considered leaving the United States, as Baldwin, Wright, Simone and other Black artists have done. He thinks about someday becoming a “world citizen,” and he wonders how living abroad might inform his art.

“I’m not one who wants to eat in a restaurant that doesn’t want to serve me…” young says. “I consider jumping out of here every day. If Chicago wasn’t, like, the best city in the world, I would bounce.”

“I understand Chicagoans just to be a different breed of folk,” young says. “We are inundated with the goodness of both coasts. We have the theater, we have the food, we have the people, because we are an international hub…. You have to get up out of America to find anything more beautiful than the skyline. And I was just telling somebody, if you roll up and down Western Avenue, you damn near have traveled the whole fucking globe.”

“safronia” at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, 20 North Wacker on April 17-18. Tickets and info at lyricopera.org.

Published in the print edition of the April 2026 issue, with the headline “Afro-Surrealist Opera, avery r. young Style: A Story of the Great Migration, ‘safronia’ Draws from Gospel, Blues, Funk and Soul. And Poetry.”