Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Her first collection won the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and the Paterson Prize for fiction; her second won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and The Bridge Book Award and was a finalist for The Aspen Prize, The Story Prize, and The LA Times Book prize for fiction. She is the 2021 winner of The New Literary Project Joyce Carol Oates Prize, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and a 2011 National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree. Her stories have appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, The Sewanee Review, and Phoebe, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008, 2010, 2017, and 2018, and in New Stories From The South.
She received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, previously taught creative writing at American University in Washington DC and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and currently teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
For speaking engagements, please contact Penguin Speakers Bureau https://www.prhspeakers.com/speaker/danielle-evans
For rights and publication inquiries please contact Ayesha Pande Literary: http://pandeliterary.com/contact-us/
For publicity requests about The Office of Historical Corrections, please contact Claire McGinnis: cmcginnis@penguinrandomhouse.com .
Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan
I have not updated the blog in a while, but you can view the archives at the links to the left, read recent interviews below, and find me on Twitter @daniellevalore , or in real life wherever the events page says I’ll be next.
Interviews:
Washington Watch (Video)
Danielle Valore Evans 
Danielle, I just completed “Before you Suffocate …” and loved it. Just wanted to let you know you’ve got a new fan who is waited with baited breath for your novel.
All the best!
Wow – I just read your book (and wrote a review for my local paper here in Chattanooga TN) and I was blown away. Thank you for sharing these voices with us and for touching me and I’m sure many others so deeply. Congratulations and I can’t wait for your upcoming novel!
Danielle, your stories are hilarious! You’re such a wonderful writer. I was just wondering, where did you go for undergrad?
I have come here on purpose to find one my favorite writers! I am an iranian translator and journalists and I have translated many
American and other nationals into Farsi for the first time. Among them
I may recall Raymond Carver, Tess Gallager, Tobias Wolff, Olga
Grushin, Olga Tucarchuk, Lori Ostlund, Salvatore Schibona and many
others for the first time. I have read some of your stories and I
have decided to translate some of your short stories into Farsi.
I have created an alert on google to get the news and events of yours. I want to have a feature about you in one of the coming issues of
an Iranian cultural monthly Golestaneh.
Accept my highest regards.
Cordially
I’m not sure how I came across your book but I’m so glad I found it. Right now I’m midway through and am definitely a fan. Plain and simple I truly admire your writing. Each story keep me wanting more. I hope to develop my craft in a way that people speak highly of my work as well in the future. I look forward to whatever you have coming out next!
Hello Danielle, I’m a huge fan of yours. I am Colombian, and for my senior thesis I worked with your short story “Virgins”. I translated it into Spanish and I would love you to have that version if you want. It was a really hard work guided by my thesis director, an incredibly smart woman. I hope this gets to you because you can’t imagine how much you have inspired me. I want to be a writer myself and reading your art has made me want to find my own path in the field. I also analyzed some aspects of your story from the gender inequality perspective. Ok, I won’t take longer. Hope you keep inspiring people with your amazing talent.
Angela Moreno.
Thank you for doing all of that work, and for your kind remarks! I know that’s a hard story to translate because of the voice. My Spanish is only passable, but I’d love to see your translation– you can send it to me at devans63@jhu.edu.
Danielle,
I’ve just finished teading ‘Boys Go to Jupiter’ and thought it was one of the best stories I’ve ever read about Life, love, race, and youth. The way our own stories spin away from us, the pain that other people can’t see, and the struggles it would be so hard to ‘teach, tell, translate’ for others is so complex and convoluted and exhausting…and your story does an amazing job of expressing that. Ultimately, I feel for all of your characters and that’s the true gift. Amazing story. Thank you.
Just chanced upon your story in BASS, 2017. Wow. Great story!
Loved your talk at UVM last semester & the conversation you had with us English students downtown afterwards—I JUST NOW finished reading “Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self” & I’m only further amazed. I can’t wait to read more of your work (that you’ve already written & will go on to write). Every story of yours I read, I’m not only entertained or moved, but I learn so much as well. Keep up the great work! 🙂
I love Robert E. Lee is Dead. I love all the other stories in Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, and Robert E. Lee is Dead shook me. I work with students CeeCee and Geena’s age, and I recognized them right away. I’ll keep working to find ways to recognize, acknowledge, celebrate, and network the gifts of young people like Geena, whose perceptiveness, courage, and selflessness we desperately need. I have so much more to say, but I should probably just share the story with the folks I know so I can bother them about it rather than gushing on a public comments page. Thanks so much.