William Evans Books in Order

William Evans is a poet, performer, instructor, speaker, and editor from Columbus, Ohio. His work moves between poetry, community spaces, and pop-culture commentary, but it often returns to simple human questions: Who gets to belong? What do families carry? How do people make room for joy when life is hard?

Before readers knew him from books, Evans had built a public life around live poetry. He founded the Writing Wrongs Poetry Slam, an open-mic and slam venue in Columbus, and performed on eight Columbus National Poetry Slam teams. His competition work took him to national finals stages, including a fifth-place finish at the 2014 Individual World Poetry Slam.

The stage came first.

His route into publishing grew out of that same performance-poetry world. In the Event You are Caught Behind Enemy Lines, his first poetry collection, arrived in 2008. It marked the beginning of a page-based body of work shaped by the force and directness of a writer used to meeting an audience face to face.

Later, Still Can't Do My Daughter's Hair brought his poems into a fuller conversation about family, masculinity, love, grief, and the daily realities of being a Black man in America. The collection looks closely at a father, a daughter, a partner, and the complicated effort to build a safe, loving home.

Home is never just scenery in this work.

In We Inherit What the Fires Left, Evans turns to race in the American suburbs and the dreams, injuries, and histories passed between generations. The poems consider fatherhood and family life in predominantly white spaces, while also asking what a person owes to the past and what they can still change for those who come after them.

Alongside poetry, Evans cofounded Black Nerd Problems with Omar Holmon. The project created room for conversations about comics, games, television, science fiction, and representation from the perspectives of people of color. Their book Black Nerd Problems collects cultural criticism and personal essays that can be funny one moment and serious the next, ranging across fandom while asking who is allowed to feel welcome in it.

That mix of humor, care, and clear-eyed criticism runs through his wider work. Evans has also served as an instructor and artist in residence, including with Columbus City Schools and the Wexner Center. He has received grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Spirit of Columbus Foundation, and he has been a fellow with Callaloo and the Watering Hole.

He received an MFA in Creative Writing from Randolph College, where he held the Blackburn Fellowship. That path fits the shape of his career. Evans has stayed connected to the immediacy of a live audience while doing the quieter, slower work of shaping poems and essays on the page.

His books invite readers into places where a comic book, a family ritual, an old wound, or a suburban street can open into a larger question. The poetry offers an intimate place to begin, while Black Nerd Problems shows how seriously, and joyfully, he takes the things people love.