Mari Evans

Mari Evans was born on the sixteenth of July 1923 at Toledo, Ohio, the only daughter of a working-class household of which she would across her life decline to provide further details — describing her early life publicly only by reference to her father's encouragement of her reading and to the early death of her mother. She attended the Toledo public schools and entered the University of Toledo as a fashion-design student in 1939. She left the university without a degree to marry the merchant seaman William Reed, a marriage that produced two sons and that ended in divorce around 1947.

She moved to Indianapolis around 1948 and worked through her thirties as a civil-service-grade clerk at a federal contracting agency. She came to poetry late, through Langston Hughes's encouragement, and published her first collection — Where Is All the Music? — at the age of forty-four in 1968. Her second collection — I Am a Black Woman of 1970 — established her as one of the central voices of the Black Arts Movement. The title poem of the volume entered within five years of publication the standard American teaching anthology of African American poetry and remains there to the present.

She published five further collections between 1979 and 2007 — Nightstar, A Dark and Splendid Mass, Whisper, Continuum, and the final selected volume of 2017. Her two children's books — JD and Singing Black — established her parallel reputation as a writer for Black children.

Her decisive editorial achievement was Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation of 1984 — the eight-hundred-page anthology she edited that constituted the founding critical anthology of Black women's writing as a recognised field within American letters. The anthology gathered work by and critical essays on fifteen writers from Gwendolyn Brooks (placed in this archive) through Lucille Clifton (placed in this archive) to Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison (placed in this archive) and was for a generation the standard graduate-level reader in the discipline.

She wrote and produced for WTTV Indianapolis the half-hour public-affairs television series The Black Experience from 1968 to 1973, taught at Cornell, at Northwestern, at Purdue, at Spelman and at Indiana University, and remained at Indianapolis as her home throughout. She died at Indianapolis on the tenth of March 2017, at ninety-three.

She is honored here as the editor of Black Women Writers.