Worthy Evans

I am a poet, artist, freelance writer, communications specialist for a Medicare Contractor in Columbia, SC.

I've moved around a lot, although not as often as I would have liked. I was born in Winter Park, FL, and lived and drove all over South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia and elsewhere ever since. I was a terrible high school student in Charleston, an average college student at the College of Charleston, a large old army recruit at 23, and with a college degree in hand I avoided officers training like the plague and ran all over Fort Leonard Wood as a combat engineer. I got to Fort Hood in 1994 and drove all around Texas. I did what I could, and saw everything I wanted to see from the windshield of my 1984 Dodge 600 or from the balcony of my barracks room that overlooked the distant mesas in the training area. I got kicked out of the army because I sprained a knee and gained a little bit of weight. That sucked, but I drove home by way of Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Oklahoma City, Fort Smith AR, and Memphis TN, and rolled home into Columbia with $4 or so.

I wrote for my first newspaper in Fairfield County, which prompted 10 years of working at newspapers in Winnsboro, Beaufort, Columbia, and Sumter. I met a Wisconsin girl getting a masters degree in English at USC, married her. We had two kids, a lot of asymmetrical adventures together and apart, while I made deadlines and she commuted from Sumter to Columbia. We moved back to Columbia in 2006, where I got a day job, but kept doing football stories on Friday nights. After writing up games, I'd go to a bar and spend all the money I earned. That didn't turn out to be a good idea, and I had to cut that out for a while. My wife and I grew apart, but we kept on going.

The poems returned after a long absence. I drank too much and it was because I was supressing a lot of things, and when I finally poured out words on these little notebooks I found at Staples, the instability stopped cold. I still drink, but it's more to go to sleep than anything else.

Eventually I had a manuscript, after I decided to start typing up poems, and after I decided that all these typed things needed to be submitted somewhere. That manuscript became my first book, Green Revolver (University of South Carolina Press, 2010), which won the SC Poetry Prize. Since then, my poems appeared various literary journals, while freelance sports articles under my byline appear regularly in several newspapers.

I'm divorced, but we're friends. She knows me awfully well. I'm happy to say she moved back to her home in Wisconsin where she lives with my daughter. My son lives with me. We are still a family. Apart, full of asymmetry, but a family.