Join Michele Evans for a reading and discussion of purl, her debut poetry collection from Finishing Line Press. Afterwards, Michele will host an open mic.

FREE & open to the public. RSVP below.

Michele Evans, a fifth-generation Washingtonian (D.C.), is a writer, teacher, and adviser for Unbound, an award-winning Northern Virginia high school literary magazine. This Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee studied at Smith College, King’s College London, and the Graduate School at the University of Maryland. Her poems have appeared in Artemis Journal, The ASP Bulletin, Maryland Literary Review, Mid-Atlantic Review, Spoken Black Girl Magazine, Welter Magazine, Yellow Arrow Journal, Zora’s Den, and elsewhere. This Watering Hole fellow and Teacher Consultant for the Northern Vriginia Writing Project lives online at www.awordsmithie.com. purl, nominated for the 2025 Maya Angelou Book Award, is her first full-length poetry collection.

About the Book

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, this poignant collection from Michele Evans resurrects feminine forces from ancient Greek mythology and relocates them in modern portraits and landscapes, pastoral and urban. Invoking Phillis Wheatley Peters as her muse, Evans amplifies a chorus of the marginalized: queens and maidens, mothers and daughters, wives and mistresses, goddesses and slaves, “muffled voices rarely heard.”

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