Meet the 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Recipient

Dear Simpsonistas,

We are writing to you today with thrilling news: Danielle Evans has been selected as the 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Recipient. She is the award-winning author of The Office of Historical Corrections (Riverhead Books), Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Penguin Random House). Her short stories have also appeared in The Paris Review, A Public Space, American Short Fiction, The Sewanee Review, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008, 2010, 2017, and 2018.

We hope, pandemic permitting, that she will take up short-term residency at the University of California, Berkeley and the Bay Area during the Spring Semester of 2022. Until then, we hope you can join us for an intimate and lively discussion between Joyce Carol Oates and Danielle Evans on Wednesday May 5th, 2021 at 4:00pm Pacific and 7:00pm Eastern. You can register for this event here.

“Danielle Evans is that rare combination: a writer of lovingly crafted, often poetic and introspective prose whose subjects are as timely as today’s headlines—disturbing, provocative, enigmatic, resisting summary or paraphrase. She has a wickedly sharp eye and ear for hypocrisy and is very funny about pretentiousness in private life as in public life.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

“Danielle Evans has more to teach us than we may be prepared to learn. Her subtle control of character and language enthralls us, and her stories dazzle with wit, passion, and insight.”

— Joseph Di Prisco

“I am thrilled and honored to receive this year’s prize, and to find myself in the wonderful company of this year’s finalists and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize’s previous winners. An award like this gives the gift of time and confidence, and I will use both as I work on my next book, a novel about celebrity, the shifting media landscape, the price of becoming an icon, and the ways our culture often simultaneously celebrates, mourns, and makes demands of Black women.”

— Danielle Evans

READ MORE ABOUT DANIELLE EVANS →

Again, we want to highlight the fine work of the 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Finalists: Jenny Offill, Darin Strauss, and Lysley Tenorio. Their work delights, inspires, and educates while speaking to the crises of our current moment. Your engagement and attention will be rewarded by their art.

Finally, you may have noticed we are now operating under a new name. Our project has grown. With each successive year we serve more and more students and teachers, readers and writers across the generations in ever-evolving ways. Now, to everything there is a season. It’s a new day, with new challenges, new opportunities, new wrongs to right, new dreams to dream, and hence we have a new name: The New Literary Project.

Thank you for your ongoing support and abundant good will. We’ll leave you with the second epigraph to Danielle’s latest book.

i am accused of tending to the past

as if i made it,

as if i sculpted it

with my own hands. i did not.

this past was waiting for me

when i came,

-- Lucille Clifton

Yours, looking into the future,

Ashley, Diane, and Joe
The New Literary Project