Mari Evans was an African-American poet, writer, and dramatist associated with the Black Arts Movement. Evans received grants and awards including a lifetime achievement award from the Indianapolis Public Library Foundation, and her poetry is known for its lyrical simplicity and the directness of its themes.

Evans was born in Toledo, Ohio. Her mother died when Evans was 10 years old. She was subsequently encouraged in her writing by her father, as she recalls in her essay “My Father’s Passage” (1984). She attended local public schools before going on to the University of Toledo, where she majored in fashion design in 1939 but left without a degree.
She later began a series of teaching appointments in American universities in 1969. During 1969–70, she served as writer in residence at Indiana University-Purdue, where she taught courses in African-American Literature. The next year, she accepted a position as an assistant professor and writer-in-residence at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where she taught until 1978.

Although her most renowned book of poetry, I Am a Black Woman, was published in 1970, many of her poems preceded the Black Arts Movement, while coinciding with the Black Arts poets’ messages of Black cultural, psychological, and economic liberation. As a scholar, she also wrote non-fiction and edited Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation (Doubleday, 1984), an important and timely critical anthology devoted to the work of fifteen writers. Mari Evans died on March 10, 2017, she was 97.

I Am a Black Woman

By Mari Evans