EVANS, MARI

born July 16, 1923, Toledo, Ohio, U.S. African-American author of poetry, children's literature, and plays. Evans attended the University of Toledo and later taught at several schools in the Midwest and East, including Purdue and Indiana universities. 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 include Nightstar: 19731978 (1981), whose poems praise blues artists and community heroes and heroines, and A Dark and Splendid Mass (1992). Evans also wrote works for juvenile readers and several plays, including 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 (19501980): A Critical Evaluation (1984).