Danielle Evans is the author of the short-story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, which was a co-winner of the 2011 PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize for a first book, the winner of the 2011 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Fiction and the 2011 Paterson Prize for Fiction, was named one of the best books of 2010 by Kirkus Reviews and O Magazine, won an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway award, and was longlisted for The Story Prize. Her work has appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, Callaloo, and Phoebe, has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008 and 2010, and in New Stories from the South. She received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, was the 2006-2007 Carol Houck Smith fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, was recently an Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at American University in Washington, DC, and is now Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.