Emerging BIWOC Poet Spotlight: Michele Evans
This monthly series features poems by women of color in the early stages of their publishing careers. It is our intention to create more space at Perugia for the work of poets who are Black, Indigenous, and women of color (BIWOC). We hope using our platform to highlight this work will expand the readership of the poets we spotlight. This series aligns with Perugia’s mission to celebrate and support emerging women poets, inclusive of gender-expansive identities; featured poems will be from poets with no more than one published full-length collection. We’d love to hear from readers with suggestions for poems & poets to feature.
August 2026 Poet: Michele Evans
anticlea
/ante-clee-ah/ n. queen of Ithaca and mother of Odysseus.
i told him too much of anything is almost always a bad thing,
just because there are too many fish in the sea doesn't mean
you should catch one for every day of the week, except sunday,
because one day, six heads will scoop you up and eat you alive.
this is not the moment i have been waiting for—hades
is a mother's hospital waiting room, a dreadful place
where restless soles pace, where twenty minutes feels
like twenty years waiting for my sons' return from
bird watching, jogging, wandering, while i sit waiting.
why don't you pick on someone your own size, i moaned, trapped
inside one cave's soundproof walls. bet this lawless monster swears
nobody did this. contradicting eye phone witness and millions
who heard my baby boy cry, choking out, "mama, i can't breathe."
Source
purl, Finishing Line Press, 2025
Poet Bio
Michele Evans is the author of februaries (Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2026) and purl (Finishing Line Press, 2025), nominated for the Maya Angelou Book Award. Before becoming an educator, this fifth-generation Washingtonian (D.C.) studied at Smith College, King’s College-London, and the Graduate School at the University of Maryland. This Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee currently teaches English and Creative Writing and serves as the adviser for Unbound, a nationally recognized high school literary magazine. She has received support from the Watering Hole, the Inner Loop, and the Virginia Association of Teachers of English (VATE). Her writing has been published in Artemis Journal, Bellevue Literary Review, Gargoyle Magazine, and elsewhere.