“Writers on Writing” Radio Show (Replay)

About the Episode
Dr. Brenda M. Greene interviews Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories (Riverhead Books, 2021). Greene and Evans discuss her motivation for writing stories, her novella, her writing process, and the emerging themes in her stories. These themes include grief, love, sexual harassment, race relations, and passing. Her novella The Office of Historical Corrections vividly illustrates the complexities of truth and history in the lives of her characters. Her epigraph for the collection, a quote from Baldwin: “We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self,” provides a premise for the genesis of this unique collection.

About the Guest
Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead Books, 2010), winner of the 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the PEN America PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Paterson Prize, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree. Her stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Paris Review, The Sewanee Review, The Best American Short Stories. Evans teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Select episodes of “Writers on Writing” are on the Center for Black Literature’s YouTube channel. Explore our digital archives!

Email writers@mec.cuny.edu for more information.