Today we’d like to introduce you to Evelyn Berry
Hi Evelyn, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
My name is Evelyn Berry. I’m an author of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. I began writing at a young age and published my debut novel at twenty-two. Now, I’m the author of the poetry collection Grief Slut and an award-winning writer.
My absolute earliest publications were in my middle school literary magazine and high school literary magazines. At age 15, I submitted a poem to one of those teen poetry anthologies that scam you by publishing everyone and forcing people to buy a copy for themselves, just to say they’ve been published. At 17, however, I learned about a local poetry competition that was offering $150 for first prize. I submitted and placed third with a poem titled “A Savage Yawp,” which was a play on the line by Walt Whitman, “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” This poem, about the indignities of public education in South Carolina, earned me seventy-five dollars. You could get PAID to write poems, and I wasn’t going to turn back.
Over the next few years, I found the spoken word community and with that began to write and perform poetry regularly. During my college years, I published one or two poems in local literary journals, all of which are out of print. College was a time for experimentation, learning to perform, and editing and then selling my novel. I began to develop a reputation, locally, as a poet to watch out for.
In 2013, my debut novel was accepted by a small, southern press based out of Augusta, GA. The novel was released to muted praise and didn’t sell many copies. I don’t really talk about this book anymore, especially now that I’ve legally changed my name. A different version of myself, I guess, wrote and published that book. After the book was published in 2016, I began to compile a poetry collection, which I hoped would be my next book. The publisher agreed to publish GOOD GHOST and sent along the contract, which I signed.
Then, I waited. In the meantime, I moved back to Aiken, South Carolina, where I finally got a full-time job after college. I lived with my parents for a few months while I struggled to save up money. I was unable to rent an apartment for reasons I don’t want to get into here, so I was spending most of my time at the local, small-town library, where I was working on what was shaping to be my second novel. It was only after, in summer of 2017 when I submitted the manuscript for the novel, that I began to fear I was being ghosted by my publisher.
I sent emails. I sent texts. I reached out to the intern, whom I learned was now a former intern. It was also during these months I moved into an apartment with my partner. Not long after, I received an email from a new intern at the publishing house, someone I had never met before. We scheduled a meeting.
The woman who owned the press, who had ushered my first novel into the world, didn’t show up to the meeting due to a scheduling conflict, but her intern spoke with me anyways. What I learned was that they were wary about moving forward with the project. But they had an idea. Because I was a spoken word poet, they wondered if I was interested in recording an audiobook. This seemed like a fascinating idea until I learned that they wanted to publish only an audiobook with no physical book to accompany it.
Which was… wild. Something that doesn’t really happen. Not to mention, they were such a small press, they had little to no distribution to speak of.
I knew then I was done with this publisher and done with this book. I had, after all, already a pretty rocky experience with them throughout the publication of my novel. I should have known better, but I was young and ambitious. I was worried I would run out of time, that if I didn’t keep publishing at a rapid pace, the literary world would cast me aside and ignore me.
Instead, I felt free once again. I was able to revisit the book and find in it flaws. I rewrote, revised, and began seriously submitting poems to journals and magazines. I knew, one day, I’d publish a full-length collection, and I’d be proud to stand behind it.
I’d work with a literary press I truly respected and who respected my work. Of course, I didn’t know the long road ahead, but I’m glad I persevered until now, when I get to share that I’m finally publishing a debut full-length collection, GRIEF SLUT.
The first poem from GRIEF SLUT which found a home was titled, “canines.” The original poem focused on body image and imagined me as a monster akin to Godzilla. Little has survived from that original draft, which has been revised under the new title “Praise Song in Lieu of Obituary.”
In the next episode, we’re going to take a closer look at how this poem evolved over time. In the wake of “Canines,” I began publishing more poems. I published nearly twenty poems in 2018, though few of those were included in the final version of GRIEF SLUT. Early versions of the following poems, often published under different titles, found homes in literary magazines: Lemonstar Magazine, Glint Journal, armarolla, Pidgeonholes, Fall Lines, Open Minds Quarterly, Split Rock Review, and Landfill.
Plenty of places also published poems that don’t appear anywhere in my books, though vestiges might be found in past chapbooks: places like Animal, museum of americana, K’in, and Rabid Oak.
This year, 2018, was a true relaunching point for me as I started to find success in literary publishing. I was beginning to mature as a poet and find an audience of readers. This was also the year I fired my publisher.
During this time, the book started to take shape. I began by submitting a chapbook called just “Ecology” to a few presses. Notably, I ranked as a finalist in a few contests, including from Black Lawrence Press, Emrys Press, and V Press. V Press was a new contender on the scene, a publisher based out of the Carolinas. When I barely missed out on being accepted during their open reading period, I received a direct phone call from the editor, a woman named Torie Amarie Dale.
During this phone call, she explained to me basically everything that was wrong with the manuscript: the words I used too much, what poems should be cut, what should be altered. I took pages of notes, and we ended up talking for nearly two hours. It was the first time an editor who had rejected my work had taken such an interest in me. And it was incredibly instructional. Of course, I was lucky for someone to care enough about my book to give me such detailed feedback.
A year later, I submitted a full-length version of the manuscript, Queer Ecology, to Galileo Press. Again, the editors of Galileo Press live in the Carolinas, and they are people I know personally. When I was rejected, I received back a massive packet of notes from editor Barrett Warner. The packet provided much-needed direction on how to write braver, sparser, and less cliche poetry.
I think it’s important to acknowledge the impact both of these editors had on my work. Even though I wasn’t a writer publishing with their press, they believed in my work and wanted to see me improve. They spent time coaching me and offering invaluable feedback. You have to remember, I don’t have an English degree or an MFA. I only took a few poetry courses in college as electives. I couldn’t afford to go to conferences. I had never before worked with an editor like this or had someone consider my work so closely.
I’m very grateful for how these editors, as well as several literary journal editors, offered advice that shaped the writer I am today.
In 2019, I decided to temporarily pause my submissions and instead pursue publishing a chapbook. Chapbooks can often earn prizes and serve as an introduction to the author. At the time, I had already published two chapbooks, Skinny Dipping Volume 1 and Volume 2. I wanted to split the current manuscript into three possible chapbooks, each with a different focused
theme. I would try to see if any of them got picked up.
Not long after, I decided to self-publish the first chapbook, called Glitter Husk, and funded this through a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. I raised just over $2,400, which I used to hire an editor, designer, and printer. I also used the funds to help create a pretty ambitious marketing campaign for the book on social media and plan a small book tour across the South.
I published three hundred copies of Glitter Husk and have as of last year sold every copy. Not longer after planning the Glitter Husk release party, I learned a second chapbook, called Buggery, had been awarded the BOOM Chapbook Prize from Bateau Press. The award came as a surprise, since I had partially created the chapbook, all queer sex poems, as an almost inside joke. But suddenly both chapbooks were out in the world.
In early 2020, I had some very high ambitions about selling and touring these books. Instead, because of COVID-19, I spent the year developing online marketing campaigns. A year later, I started to seriously start using TikTok as a platform to educate people about creative writing, chat about books I love, and hopefully sell my books.
Creating these chapbooks– going through the process of editing and designing a book first self-published and then traditionally-published– back-to-back helped me learn so much about creating and marketing poetry.
The first boy I kissed was from California. We met at a student bar at the top of a mountain, not far outside the renovated army barracks where I was renting a room for the summer for two hundred euro a month. The following day, he stopped speaking to me because I wasn’t out to my parents; he didn’t want to sleep with someone who couldn’t be honest with themselves. I get that perspective now, but at the time, I was devastated. I returned a few months later to the United States and slept with a boy for the first time in the height of my slut era. It was a disastrous but instructional experience. I was twenty-one years old and dressed as a swamp witch for Halloween. I was beginning to explore bisexuality at the same time I was beginning to question my gender. I was wearing skirts to class. This was also the height of my smudged eyeliner era.
What’s most important to understand is that I was repressed. I was struggling to reconcile who I was becoming with who I had been. So, I started to write sex poems. At first, the poems were about having sex with monsters and about my fear surrounding HIV AIDs. I convinced myself, very quickly, to stop sleeping with men because I was afraid. I was afraid, maybe, that God might punish me. It was a confusing time. Anyway, I was dating someone, and although we both identified as non-binary, I know we both struggled with our relationship to both sex and gender and our gender roles inside of sex.
In poetry and fiction, I could allow myself to be anything. To anything. To fuck anyone. Even Moth man, which I do in the poem “Moth man Fucks Me From Behind.” It wasn’t until a year or so later that I started dating guys, though only in secret still. But although I wasn’t super public about the sex I was having or the men I was seeing, I started writing poems about my experiences and sharing those. It was through poetry I first became comfortable talking openly about queer experiences.
Grief in Grief Slut is not abstract or a metaphor. A close friend of mine died in April 2020. All I know is, I loved him, and now he was gone. And we would never make up. We would never speak again. I felt like, already, I had mourned him once and I would mourn him again. Isolated and alone, drunk and desperate, I did the only thing I knew how to do: I wrote. I processed. I wrote poem after poem, pleas for him to return from the dead.
I thought maybe that writing poems about him could keep him alive, even if only in memory. But poetry feels inadequate to honor the dead. I was, I guess, a slut for grief, pining for grief, hoping that writing about trauma might save me from trauma. But nothing could save me from that.
In 2021, I began medically transitioning, and for the first few months, although I was awash in strong feelings and confusion and excitement, I found I couldn’t write about the experience. Meanwhile, I was working on a novel manuscript while waiting to hear back from a few publishers, to whom I had sent an older version of the manuscript “Crown Me Queen of the Chitlin Strut” published under my dead name.
It was fortunate, in a way, that those books were rejected. It was fortunate, all along, I think, that my book kept being rejected.
Because now, at least, I can look forward to having my first poetry collection out in the world with my new name printed on the cover.
Transitioning actually really shifted the trajectory of the book. A lot of early readers of the book have commented that it’s a book about being trans in the South, though I think it is more so about who I was before transition. The first section of the book contains poems about childhood, by which I mean a southern boyhood. At the time, I was writing a lot about boyhood and masculinity and trying to grasp how I saw myself in the fabric of those ideas.
I came out publicly as a trans woman a few months after I began transitioning in November 2023. A few of you may have already followed me online by that point. Just a few days later, I went to stay at Firefly Farms in the Writer’s Coop, a residency hosted by Sundress Academy for the Arts. I spent the week perusing their library of chapbooks and spending time in the woods, revising poems.
Looking back at old poems, especially poems about sex and masculinity, I was beginning to see how trans these poems had been all along. So I started to revise with that idea in mind. I suffused the poems with a consideration of gender transition and used even old poems to reflect a new self. Over the next few months, I also finally started to write coherently about my transition.
I wrote poems like “the first time my nipples,” “tres(passing),” and “yes, I’ve seen the future,” among others. For those of you familiar with my work, I tackle the questions of trasness head-on in these poems: I ask about the flexibility and fallibility of the self, how a person can change and grow and transform over time.
After years of submitting my work to sixteen publishers, I finally got the email every writer dreams of receiving. Sundress Publications wanted to publish my debut collection, Grief Slut. I was overjoyed. I was ecstatic. This news came at a very interesting time for me, maybe three days after I learned some other life-changing news. I had received a call, earlier that same week, to inform me I had been awarded a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
These two developments felt like the validation for which I had been waiting for years. People were taking my work seriously and wanted to help share my work with the world.
Of course, I let them know the manuscript was still available and that I would be delighted to have them publish my work. You have to understand, this was one of my dream publishers. I was so excited to work with them and ready to share the news with the world.
Since then, I’ve toured across the country and garnered a lot of attention for this beautiful little book. Publishing it has been life-changing and life-affirming.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’m a trans, Southern writer, editor, and educator. I’m the author of Grief Slut (Sundress Publications, 2024) and Buggery (Bateau Press, 2020), winner of the BOOM Chapbook Prize.
I’m also recipient of a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, 2022 Dr. Linda Veldheer Memorial Prize, 2019 Broad River Prize for Prose, and 2018 Emrys Poetry Prize, among other honors. My work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, South Carolina Review, Gigantic Sequins, Raleigh Review, Taco Bell Quarterly, and elsewhere.
I’m the founder of Ecstatic Stanzas, which offers creative services including performance, workshops, writing coaching, editorial feedback, copyediting, creative marketing, and more.
I am a literary organizer who has worked with collectives and non-profits including The Unspoken Word, Speakeasy, Whiskey Writers, and most recently Queer Writers of Columbia. I’ve lead workshops at community centers, universities, high schools, elementary schools, writing groups, conferences, festivals, and elsewhere since 2014.
I have performed in venues across the Southeast, including the Gallaird Center for Performing Arts, Columbia Museum of Art, Charleston Music Hall, Dock Street Theatre, Queen Street Theatre, Pure Theatre, Asheville Art Museum, and elsewhere, including festivals, house shows, open mics, reading series, universities, hostels, bookstores, and elsewhere.
I lives in Columbia, South Carolina with my partner and our pets.
How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
I am available for readings, workshops, and one-on-one editing sessions. You can learn more about the services I offer here: https://evelynberrywriter.com/creative-services
Contact Info:
- Website: https://EvelynBerryWriter.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/evelynberrywriter/
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/evelynBerryWriter
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Evie_Writer
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@EcstaticStanzas
- Other: https://tiktok.com/@evelynberrywriter
