Poet Evelyn Berry is one of 36 writers to receive a 2023 creative writing fellowship of $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts. The only 2023 literary arts fellow living in South Carolina, Berry currently resides in Columbia, but played an essential role in the Charleston literary scene. She’s particularly recognized for her work in co-founding and curating the “Unspoken Word” event series, with friend and fellow poet A.J. Johnson, from 2013-2018. Berry continues to work alongside the Poetry Society of South Carolina and the Free Verse Poetry Festival.
“It’s honestly been wild,” Berry said about receiving the highly competitive fellowship. “I’ve already got a lot of other really cool opportunities because people are starting to view my work with more validity I suppose.” Many American recipients of the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award and Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and Fiction were recipients of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships early in their careers.
Berry is a trans Southern author of a forthcoming poetry collection Grief Slut which is set to be released in Jan. 2024, and the young adult novel Heathens and Liars of Lickskillet County. Her chapbook Buggery received the 2019/2020 BOOM Chapbook Prize from Bateau Press.
“Grief Slut will be my debut poetry collection,” Berry said. “I wanted to write a poetry book that felt both daring and also devastating. It’s a little dirty, while also being — hopefully — deeply moving. It’s as if you were to bite into a candy apple, and there’s a razor inside.”
This poetry collection, which Berry began in 2015, has evolved through many different iterations. Berry sent the work to multiple publishers throughout the years, but she said she is glad it was not published sooner, as she is grateful and excited to work with Sundress Publications, a nonprofit press based out of Knoxville, Tenn.
“They publish a lot of Southern, and especially queer Southern poetry, so it’s been a delight to be paired with such a publisher,” she said. “It’s difficult to find a publisher that you trust and that will help to shepherd your work into the world in a way that shows that they care. This is something that people don’t often talk about with publishers, but it’s important that you’re working with good, kind people.
“What I like about this final version of Grief Slut is that a lot of my poems reflected a very particular point in my life, which was pre-transition. I’m not super far into transition now, only about a year and a half, but it was helpful that I was able to revise and think about how to compile this collection with that narrative in mind, which of course kind of changes the nature of the poems that I wrote before transition,” Berry said.
“It’s nice to have a book coming out that will have my name, Evelyn Berry on it, instead of my dead name, which my past books have. So I’ll be excited to have that out in the world.”
Berry said that she will use the NEA fellowship funds to research queer history in South Carolina.
“The work of Harlan Greene has been really influential on my thinking about the legacy and sometimes hidden histories of queer South Carolina.
“I’ve been able to write about those things — everything from now-closed gay clubs, to the history of cruising. … I have to imagine that there’s a lot more stories out there, especially in the more rural communities.
“In my current and future work, what I’m hoping to do is dive even deeper into that history and that legacy. Using these stories to write — not about me per se, but about rural trans women, and how they are surviving and have survived in South Carolina and created networks of care. That’s something that really interests me.”
Berry said that, though her work is based on personal experience, she hopes her poetry can reach many. Accessibility is important to the author, exemplified by the way she speaks about her community work.
“I want to create and have created spaces [for people] to come and read or listen to poetry that is free and accessible. I always want to make sure there is a variety of poetry, that people without any institutional backing, from places like universities or literary backgrounds can come, and not just experience poems on an emotional level, but also learn something about craft,” she said.
“Poetry has the potential to change peoples’ lives in big and small ways: from someone reading a poem that might save them in a time of deep despair, to a poem that might make someone slow down and appreciate a moment of beauty. Poetry has the potential to move people, if you create the space and the opportunity to do so.”
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