Join AARP for An Afternoon of Poetry and Conversation with Michele Evans

Michele Evans is the author of the debut poetry collection purl (Finishing Line Press, 2025), which was nominated for the 2025 Maya Angelou Book Award. She is a fifth-generation Washingtonian (D.C.), writer, teacher, and adviser for Unbound, an award-winning Northern Virginia high school literary magazine. This Watering Hole Fellow studied English at Smith College, King’s College London, and the Graduate School at the University of Maryland. Her poems have appeared in Gargoyle, Mid-Atlantic Review, Porcupine Literary, Spoken Black Girl Magazine, Welter Magazine, Zora’s Den, and elsewhere.

februaries—a chapbook of poems inspired by the literary tradition established by an assembly of living legends from the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, such as by Dr. Joanne V. Gabbin and E. Ethelbert Miller. Composed over a 10-year period, februaries celebrates the contributions and achievements of Americans often showcased only during Black history month. This chapbook was influenced by her participation in the National African American Read-In (AARI) founded by the Black Caucus of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). Chronicling and preserving the achievements and contributions of ancestors Harriet Tubman, Billie Holiday, Maya Angelou, and others, februaries became a museum constructed of poignant poems diverse in form that reminds readers: Black History is American History, and it should be “celebrated, appreciated, and narrated” well beyond the annual 28-day observance.