Danielle Evans

The novella that closes The Office of Historical Corrections invents a federal agency whose staff travel the country correcting the public record, plaque by plaque, until two of its agents fall out over what happened to a Black shopkeeper in 1930s Wisconsin. Six stories come before it. Danielle Evans, born in 1983, studied at Columbia and took her MFA at Iowa; her first collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and a place on the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 list. The second book, published by Riverhead in November 2020, was named winner of the 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize and reached the Story Prize shortlist. She has taught at American University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is now on the faculty of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins.