Nominated for the Maya Angelou Book Award
Using a mixture of poetic forms varying in subject, shape, style, and size, purl reimagines timeless myths from Homer’s Odyssey. Stitched from classical translations, verses honoring feminine forces swirl across modern epic landscapes. This poignant debut collection, inspired by the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters, 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 threaded through literature and life.
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.
About the Artist
Harrison Evans is a self-taught artist from Virginia. Working with a primarily monochromatic palette, he specializes in digital and body art. Fueled by creativity and passion, this emerging illustrator aspires to use his art to enrich, educate, and empower those in his community and beyond.
Michele will be in conversation with Teri Ellen Cross Davis.
Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union, (Mad Creek Books, 2021) winner of the Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize and Haint, winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. She is the winner of the Poetry Society of America's 2020 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award and recipient of grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and The Freya Project. She has been awarded fellowships and scholarships to Cave Canem, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, and more. She is on the boards of Lit Youngstown, Cave Canem, and Poetry Daily. Her work has been published in many anthologies and journals. She makes her home in Silver Spring, Maryland with poet Hayes Davis and their two teens.
The Inner Loop creates inclusive and accessible opportunities for our diverse network of both emerging and established writers to connect with each other, to connect to their community, and to transform the written word into a shared experience through the act of reading aloud.