Mari Evans

American author

Written and fact-checked by

Britannica Editors

History

Mari Evans (born July 16, 1923, Toledo, Ohio, U.S.—died March 10, 2017, Indianapolis, Indiana) was an African American author of poetry, children’s literature, and plays.

Evans attended the University of Toledo and later taught at several other schools, including Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She began five years of writing, producing, and directing for an Indianapolis television program, The Black Experience, in 1968, the same year her first poetry collection, Where Is All the Music?, was published. With her second collection, I Am a Black Woman (1970), she gained acclaim as an important new poet. Her poem “Who Can Be Born Black” was often anthologized.

Her later collections included Nightstar: 1973–1978 (1981), whose poems praise blues artists and community heroes and heroines, and A Dark and Splendid Mass (1992). Continuum, published in 2007 (rev. ed. 2015), contains classic poems from Evans’s previous collections as well as new work inflected by the same unique insight into African American life that defined her earlier oeuvre. In her works for young readers, Evans often touched on difficult topics such as child abuse (Dear Corinne: Tell Somebody, 1999) and adolescent relationships (I’m Late: The Story of LaNeese and Moonlight and Alisha Who Didn’t Have Anyone of Her Own, 2005). Evans’s plays include River of My Song (produced 1977) and the musical Eyes (produced 1979), an adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. She edited the anthology Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation (1984) and published Clarity as Concept: A Poet’s Perspective (2006), a collection of essays commenting on African American politics and family life.