Danielle Evans

Danielle Evans is an American short story writer known for her technically accomplished, emotionally precise fiction about race, class, and identity in contemporary America. Born in Washington, DC, she received her MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her debut collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (2010) won the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, the Paterson Prize, and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. Her second collection, The Office of Historical Corrections (2020), won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize in 2021 and was widely praised as one of the best short story collections of recent years. Evans was selected for the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 list in 2011. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, A Public Space, American Short Fiction, and multiple editions of The Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is an associate professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her fiction is noted for its structural complexity, its refusal of easy resolution, and its deeply compassionate rendering of the lives of young Black women.