Dressed for the season, Mr. Bill on the desk at the Cambridge library, his poem behind him.
If you’ve ever been to the Dorchester County Public Library, you already know Bill Epps. He’s the imposing yet affable septuagenarian behind the desk who remembers your name, finds the book you couldn’t see, and always has a kind word – an ordinary guy doing an ordinary job.
Except one day a letter arrived that proved he’s not quite so ordinary after all.
Turns out, he’s not just a poet, but a good one. His paean to the celebrated abolitionist Oh Harriet Tubman! (Light Director Extraordinaire), which hangs on the wall behind his desk, won first place in the Maryland division of the 2025 National Veterans Creative Arts Competition in October.
“I was just blown away,” Epps, who everyone calls Mr. Bill, says with a chuckle: “I never thought anything like that would happen to me.”
Epps never set out to be a published writer, but he always loved to read. Growing up on the streets of Philadelphia, he admits he was a poor student and found his way only after joining the U.S. Air Force. After retirement, he moved to Cambridge in January 2006 and later took a volunteer position at the library, which evolved into his current job in 2015.
Surrounded by books, he nurtured his love for reading and was moved by a biography of Tubman, who was born enslaved a few miles down the road, escaped her bondage, and returned to ultimately free hundreds of others. In the great emancipator, he saw inspiration for her modern-day Dorchester descendants.
“I learned how she got her freedom,” he says. “She could have stayed free and lived her life safe and far away. But she didn’t. She came back over and over again. For her family. For strangers. Risking everything every single time.”
After devouring the entire shelf of the library’s Harriet lore, he did what he had always done when something moved him deeply: he wrote it down. In rhyme, because that’s what poems do, he figured. No stylistic models, no major influences to speak of, except perhaps Toni Morrison.
He showed the finished piece to the directors of the Harriet Tubman Museum, who asked him to read it at their annual dinner. When he finished with the work, simply rhymed A-B-A-B with little concern for conventions like meter, some were in tears. Soon afterward, he had it printed on canvas. One copy went to the Tubman Center, and the other right back to the library wall where it hangs today.
Years later, some fellow veterans saw it and said, “Mr. Bill, you ought to enter that in the VA contest.” He shrugged, mailed it in, and forgot about it until that letter came.
Poetry wasn’t new to him. It started decades ago when his three boys were young.
“I wanted to leave them something,” he says. “My thoughts, the things I believed in. I started putting them into poems so they’d always have them.”
When he first showed the boys, their jaws dropped: “Dad, you wrote this?”
He has written dozens of others since, about life, about faith, and some too private to discuss. “They come when they come,” he says with a shrug. “Sometimes a poem just gets in my head and follows me around until I have to write it down. Then it leaves me alone.”
The Tubman poem arrived the same way.
Today, one of his sons is a rapper who writes his own lyrics. His youngest dreams of making fitness videos. Mr. Bill smiles when he talks about them. “Maybe something rubbed off,” he says.
When people stop in front of that canvas, teenagers reading it line by line, or older folks nodding as if agreeing with an old friend, Mr. Bill doesn’t need to jump up and claim authorship. Their concentrated faces bring plenty of satisfaction.
In a town that sees in the glory of Harriet Tubman a reflection of their own pain and struggles with discrimination and disenfranchisement, and the courage and persistence to continue working towards a better future, Mr. Bill’s words have become part of the air people breathe here.
Oh Harriet Tubman, I too am a lens through which grand wisdom shines.
A light conducting instrument seeking dark and troubled minds.
The poem, simple as it is, carried him all the way to unexpected recognition. But for Mr. Bill, the prize was never on the page. It was in the moment he first read Harriet Tubman’s story and felt something ignite, something he had to pass on.
All because an ordinary man read an extraordinary life, and couldn’t stay quiet about it.
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