Author Event: purl by Michele Evans

Come join us at Birch Tree Bookstore on March 14th from 6:30 to 8PM for a special reading and discussion with Michele Evans about her new collection of poetry purl. 

About the Collection
purl, a new collection of poems by Michele Evans, uses a mixture of poetic forms to reimagine timeless myths from Homer's Odyssey. Stitched from classical translations, Evans amplifies a chorus of the marginalized: queens and maidens, mothers and daughters, wives and mistresses, goddesses and slaves, “brimming with songs/ muffled voices rarely heard.” With each page turn, readers are invited to celebrate the resilience of women bound by those universal traumas found in literature and life. "Michele Evans bends Greek mythology into a vessel to deftly capture the rage, the love, and the memory of generations of Black American women longing to be heard. This debut collection marks the emergence of a long-simmering poet ready to shake the world--and anything unrooted--with her elegies," says Brooke C. Obie, award-winning author of Book of Addis: Cradled Embers. These virtuosic poems swirl and sing, writes Saida Agostini, author of let the dead in, as the collection knits together Greek mythology with contemporary reflections that feel both prescient and deft." Teri Ellen Cross Davis, author of a more perfect Union says Evans's poems weave threads of intimacy, anguish, loss, and more in a work that ranges in form and voice. According to Moira Egan, the poems in purl are "fierce, feminist, experimentally formal (the “diademia” sonnet crown is a tour de force). Revisiting, subverting, and modernizing mythological characters, from 'aeolia' to 'sirenia,' from 'arachnia' to 'xenia,' Evans makes their stories ours, and our stories theirs. The poems interrogate family, violence, love, leaving the reader moved, with “eyes unveiled.”

About the Author

Michele Evans, a fifth-generation Washingtonian (D.C.), is a writer, teacher, and adviser
for Unbound, an award-winning high school literary magazine. This Pushcart Prize and Best of the
Net nominee, Watering Hole Fellow, and winner of The ASP Bulletin Poetry Contest studied at
Smith College, King's College London, and the Graduate School at the University of Maryland. Her
poems have appeared in Artemis Journal, Maryland Literary Review, Yellow Arrow Journal, Mid-Atlantic
Review, Spoken Black Girl Magazine, Sky Island Journal, and elsewhere. purl is her first full-length poetry
collection.