Poet Kerry James Evans on Gathering Fragments into Stillness
Elena Kang, a first-year MFA student in poetry and editorial assistant for Pinch, had the opportunity to interview Kerry James Evans. The interview took place in October 2025 across email. His second book Nine Persimmons will be published in March 2026 by the University of Nebraska Press and is available for preorder.
Tell us about your second book, the Honorable Mention selection in the Backwaters Prize, which will be published in March 2026.
Nine Persimmons has taken shape over more than a decade. My first book, Bangalore, came from a place of urgency—those poems carried fear, survival, and the shadow of military life. This book moves differently, through pilgrimage and transition. I’ve lived in more than twenty-seven homes and attended eight schools, so change has been a constant.
The book traces those passages, each poem like a threshold crossed. I’ve worked jobs my whole life, taught and studied through graduate school, supported myself through grants, and finally settled again into teaching. Many of the poems carry those crossings, bound to a lifelong search for steadiness. Nearer the South—Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Virginia, now Georgia—Nine Persimmons gathers those fragments into a kind of stillness. To me, it’s a record of finding a few steady poems amid years of motion.
What were your influences while writing this book?
When I think of influence, I like its earliest meaning—when it referred to the flow of energy from the stars into human life, from in-fluere, “to flow into.” I’m drawn to that sense of permeability: how the world and language pass through us, one current at a time, until some form of coherence takes shape. My poems often begin with the ordinary: old jobs, what I’m reading, what I’m listening to, phone calls with family, small routines, and somewhere in that mix, images and phrases begin to align. My family, friends, mentors, and fellow poets are in there too—their voices threading beneath like roots in the yard. That’s how the poems, and eventually the book, formed; the world’s moving parts find their frequency, and the camera focuses.
What did it mean to have your poem “Fever Dream” published in our Spring 2022 issue?
Pinch has supported my work for nearly two decades, publishing “Waiting for Fire,” “Arachne’s Tapestry,” “Atomic Bible,” and “Fever Dream.” “Waiting for Fire” appeared later in my first collection with Copper Canyon, but your editors were the first to believe in it. It’s a long, surreal poem, and over the years I’ve tended to send you work that pushes further into risk. “Arachne’s Tapestry,” for example, is told from the perspective of Arachne after she’s been transformed into a spider—it fuses myth with a domestic scene of putting her daughter to bed. Pinch has always felt like a home for work unafraid to blur perception, to court strangeness until it makes its own kind of sense.
What do you think it means to be a writer in the time of AI?
Maybe the oldest questions are still the best ones: what’s real, and how do we recognize it? The tools change, but the mind behind the words—its hunger and wonder—remains the same. Writing now, I try to hold onto that, to trust the work of the hand and the limits of what it can know.
Nine Persimmons is your second book; your first was Bangalore, published by Copper Canyon. Can you tell us a bit about your process of putting a collection together?
As a manuscript takes shape, poems, images, and ideas begin to gravitate, repel, and circle until patterns emerge. This book has worn many faces—different titles, shifting sequences, poems that arrived and later fell away. It’s been a long dialogue. Ultimately, the finished version marks a moment in time, a still point in that ongoing movement. Each section reflects where I paused to listen—the instant when the dialogue among poems felt clear enough to name.
You were a faculty member for the 2024 Poetry in the Woods Workshop in St. Louis, MO. What was that experience like for you? Did anything from that weekend stay with you as a teacher or a poet?
The organizer, my friend and fellow Saluki, Travis Mossotti, invited me to teach alongside my longtime mentor and friend, James Kimbrell. We spent a weekend in the woods, reading, hiking, and talking poems with an extraordinary group of writers who brought thoughtful, ambitious work. As for what stayed with me most, it’d have to be the wolf howl. Travis gave a participant the honor of calling out to them, and a few seconds later, the woods answered. We went still; for a moment, language thinned to a single vowel, and we listened.
Which university do you think has the best tiger mascot?
LSU—their Tigers have that bayou swagger, purple and gold under the lights. But when I think of the Golden Tigers, I think of the great students and colleagues from my time at Tuskegee. It’s where I learned as much as I taught, and where the legacy of Black American literature runs deep—Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, and the many writers they shaped. I was fortunate to mentor two students who went on to fully funded MFA programs at Alabama and Florida State, both of whom have since graduated.
Is there a piece of art, literature, music, or film that you’ve interacted with recently? What did you think about it?
Yes, the last few books I’ve read are John Liles’ Bees and After, Richard Siken’s I Do Know Some Things, Mia S. Willis’ the space between men, and Maria Zoccola’s Helen of Troy, 1993—all fine books. I was especially glad to see Zoccola’s debut on shelves this year. I’d been following many of those poems in journals before they found their home in a collection, and I included the book this fall in my Advanced Workshop.
The students lit up. Zoccola drags Helen out of the Iliad and drops her into a sticky '90s Tennessee suburb, all minivans and muted furies. She reimagines the mythic as sharp and domestic, Helen unraveling her housewife apron while the old stories hum somewhere in the background. Zoccola doesn’t just modernize Helen—she gives her a voice that’s funny, cutting, and tender in equal measure. The poems blur the epic and the everyday in ways that sparked real conversation: What does it mean to rewrite a face that launched a thousand ships into one that’s simply trying to survive the neighborhood potluck? (Editor’s Note: Zoccola is a native Memphian).
Tell us about what you associate with Memphis
Memphis has always felt like a portal, a place where the ordinary world and something otherworldly meet. Once, the Greyhound broke down downtown, and I spent the night in the bus station, waiting. Somewhere in there, I ended up talking with a musician, and we walked to a diner together. It was pouring rain, and we just sat there, him talking music, me talking poetry. I’d memorized a few Coleridge lines, some other odds and ends, and we filled the gaps where we could. It was unreal. By the time it came to get back on the bus, my idea of going home would never be the same.
How would you define “Pinchy?”
Pinchy poems trust that strangeness will carry them through. They aren’t afraid to stumble toward meaning, or to let the image lead the logic. A Pinchy poem keeps its nerve when the world starts to tilt.
