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Danielle Evans

Danielle Evans is the author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, winner of the 2011 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize.

Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories 2008, and other literary publications. Her story “Someone Ought to Tell Her There’s Nowhere to Go” appears in The Best American Short Stories 2010.

Evans received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, was a fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and is now teaching at American University in Washington, D.C.

Articles by Danielle Evans

Thursday October 13

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

We were fifteen and it was the first weekend after school started, and me and Jasmine were sitting side by side on one of Mr. Thompson’s ripped-up green-and-white lawn chairs, doing each other’s nails while the radio played “Me Against the World.”

Monday February 8

Looking for Black Literature?

I first understood what people meant when they spoke of intangible white privilege when I realized that I read differently than other people. Literature had often asked me to identify with characters who were not only unlike me in terms of their experience of race, but were often actively hostile to women, or to Black