This fall marks my 24th year of teaching English at Broad Run High School in Northern Virginia. As I begin to think about how many years I have left in the classroom, I’m reminded of something Maya Angelou said on the cusp of her retirement, “I always said I am a writer who can teach, but now I realize that I am a teacher who can write.”

Like the students in my classroom who often don’t see themselves as writers, I, too, suffer from chronic bouts of Imposter Syndrome. Since I prioritized being a teacher over being a writer, my writing career didn’t really begin until 2015 — the year I participated in the Northern Virginia Writing Project Summer Institute for educators at George Mason University. When the director, Sarah Rickless, provided an overview of the month-long program, she used words like “life-changing” and “transformative” to describe previous participants’ experiences.

For four weeks that July, I was writing in a spiral notebook, eating at the dining hall, meeting with my writing group in the library, and sometimes just sitting on the grassy lawn watching blossoms sway in the wind. I wrote a lot that summer and really haven’t stopped since. I will be forever grateful to Dave Arbogast, a retired English teacher and supervisor from Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS), for nominating me for the program and for seeing me as both a teacher and a writer.

 Another pivotal moment in my writer’s journey occurred five years later, in 2020, as the world was literally shutting down because of the pandemic. I was in the middle of teaching The Odyssey to my ninth graders when I got the news that schools were going online for the remainder of the year. With a little more time in my schedule, I enrolled in a virtual poetry workshop with award-winning poet Moira Egan sponsored by the Keats-Shelley House in Rome.

After the first Zoom meeting, I learned many of the writers in the group had ties to the DMV because they’d taken classes with Egan before at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. By the end of that workshop, I’d written several poems inspired by female voices from Homer’s classic epic poem and generated a list in my journal for future ones.

A year later, I registered for another online course, a chapbook manuscript class with Meg Eden at the Writer’s Center. Out of all the workshops, craft talks, readings, mixers, panels, and open mics I’ve attended in person and online, this course really helped me navigate the world of becoming published. Over the course of several weeks, I learned how to write an author’s bio without having any publication credits and drafted my first cover letter. I discovered places to submit my poetry after exploring New Pages, Poets & Writers, and other resources. And I wrote more poems from that original journal list and prepared myself to receive rejections, lots of them.

What I wasn’t prepared for were the acceptances — from people, magazines, and organizations in the ever-expanding DMV literary community. A lot of good things have happened in the months since purl was released by Finishing Line Press. And I’m so grateful to all who have championed its debut and helped me navigate the journey of becoming a teacher who can also write.

Thank you to the Inner Loop and the following for your ongoing support: Artemis, Art Wife, the ASP Bulletin, Birch Tree Books, Books & Bounty, Busboys and Poets, 804 Literary Salon, Esther Productions, Gargoyle, Grit & Gravity, Kramers, LCPS Libraries, Maryland Literary Review, Mid-Atlantic Review, MoCo Underground, Poetry Society of Virginia, PWC Libraries, Reston Readers, Scribente-Maternum, Washington City Paper, Washington Independent Review of Books, Washington Underground, WWPH Writes, Welter Magazine, the Writer’s Center, Yellow Arrow, and Zora’s Den.

[Editor’s note: This piece is in support of the Inner Loop’s “Author’s Corner,” a monthly campaign that spotlights a DC-area writer and their recently published work from a small to medium-sized publisher. The Inner Loop connects talented local authors to lit lovers in the community through live readings, author interviews, featured book sales at Potter’s House, and through Eat.Drink.Read., a collaboration with restaurant partners Pie Shop, Shaw’s Tavern, and Reveler’s Hour to promote the author through special events and menu and takeout inserts.]

Michele Evans is the author of purl, a contemporary poetry collection inspired by Homer’s Odyssey and the verses of Phillis Wheatley Peters. Nominated for the 2025 Maya Angelou Book Award, purl reimagines feminine forces from Greek mythology, American history, and the present to celebrate the resilience of women bound by universal traumas threaded through life and literature. Evans, a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and winner of the 2023 ASP Bulletin Poetry Contest, is an English teacher and adviser for Unbound, a nationally recognized, award-winning high-school literary magazine.