Whitworth Welcomes Award-Winning Author Danielle Evans
Evans’ first short story collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, won the 2011 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize. The New York Times said the stories evoked “the thrill of an all-night conversation with your hip, frank, funny college roommate.” That same year, Evans was honored by the National Book Foundation as one of its “5 Under 35” fiction writers.
Evans’ work was anthologized in Best American Short Stories collections in 2008, 2010 and 2017. Her stories have also appeared in The Paris Review and A Public Space.
“I have been teaching Danielle Evans’ stories since arriving at Whitworth in 2018; when her new book, The Office of Historical Corrections, was released, I immediately read it and assigned it to my advanced writing workshop,” says Jake Andrews, assistant professor of English. “She is an exquisite prose stylist who writes subtly about America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. During her visit, our students will get to meet a major 21st-century writer and hear from her about writing, about publishing and about America.”
The 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellow currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University. Evans has also held teaching positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and American University.
Evans was featured in an episode of This American Life in July 2020. Shortly thereafter, The Office of Historical Corrections, a collection of seven stories, was released, becoming a finalist for The Story Prize.
Last year, Evans was awarded the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize.
For more information on Danielle Evans, please visit www.prhspeakers.com.
About Whitworth University:
Located in Spokane, Wash., Whitworth is a private liberal arts university affiliated with the Presbyterian church. The university, which has an enrollment of nearly 3,000 students, offers more than 100 undergraduate and graduate degree programs.
Contacts:
Trisha Coder, media relations manager, Whitworth University, (509) 777-4703 or tcoder@whitworth.edu.
