Achievements 
- PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize in 2011 for a first book
- 2011 Paterson Prize for Fiction
- 2011 Hurston-Wright prize for fiction
- Ranked in the 2010 poll by Kirkus Reviews and O magazine as one of the best books of the year
- Several other magazines have showcased her work, such as The Paris Review, A Public Space, Callaloo, and Phoebe
- In 2008 and 2010, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self was published in The Best American Short Stories and also in New Stories from the South.
- Earned a Masters in Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers Workshop for fiction writing.
- Received an award for the 2006-2007 Houck Smith fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.
- Currently teaches in Washington D.C. at American University.

Interview with Fiction Writers Review and She Writes

Danielle Evans was interviewed by Michelle Scholes Young regarding the book Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. In this interview Evans explains what it is meant to be an insider and an outsider, one of our main themes for this project. She doesn’t particularly like the term insiders and outsiders because the words have a deep meaning, but depending on the scenario can change the definition. In an interview with Fiction Writers Evan’s says, “ I think for most of the characters, the trouble comes not from a sense of outsideness, but a sense of trying to belong, or actively belonging, in more than one place at once.”  She tosses the terms around loosely because it is possible to have characteristics of both an insider and an outsider at the same time. For example, Eva is said to be the character that fits the description of an outsider the most, but at the same time she exerts control of her body and has a sense of self making her an insider.

Race is another topic that is brought up in the interview that is related to our theme the black sexual body. Evans says in an interview with Fiction Writers, “Most of my characters are somehow marked or shaped by their racial identities in the present or by an experience of the past that is deeply rooted in our country’s struggle with race and racial equality.” Skin color is something that affects the characters throughout all the short stories. In the story Harvest, there was an advertisement that offered $15,000 for human eggs, but the girls said "If they had wanted brown babies who so obviously didn't belong to them, they would have just adopted." The black girls didn’t think their eggs were desired because of their skin color. In an interview with She Writes she elaborates on the topic of race, Evans says to Dolen Perkins-Valdez “…I think a lot of minority characters in fiction get that treatment – their “blackness” or “ethnicness” is the first and only thing about them. So, I wanted the characters I was writing to feel like fully rounded individuals, who were dealing with race in specific and human ways, and also dealing with issues in life that didn’t revolve around their racial identities. In some of the stories it wasn’t easy to figure out that the characters were black. In King of a Vast Empire it involved a mom, dad, brother, and sister with no stated obvious claims of what their race was. The issue at hand was the car accident Terrence and Liddie were in when they were children. 
 


Reading with NPR

In this video, Danielle Evans reads part of Wherever You Go, There You Are.