Desiree S. Evans writes fiction for children, teens, and adults. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming young-adult fiction anthology The Black Girl Survives in This One (Flatiron Books, 2024), and a contributor to the young-adult fiction anthologies Cool. Awkward. Black. (Penguin Teen, 2023) and Foreshadow: Stories to Celebrate the Magic of Reading and Writing YA (Algonquin Young Readers, 2020).
Desiree’s creative writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and has appeared in literary journals such as Gulf Coast, The Offing, Nimrod Journal, and other venues. Her work has received support from the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA/Voices), Kimbilio Fiction, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. She is a 2020 winner of a Walter Dean Myers Grant for children’s fiction awarded by the nonprofit organization We Need Diverse Books.
Hailing from the bayous of South Louisiana, Desiree’s creative and scholarly work often grapples with Black life in the American South. She was the 2021-2022 Gulf South Writer in the Woods, appointed through a residency program of Tulane University’s New Orleans Center for the Gulf South and A Studio in the Woods. She was recently the 2022-2023 Southern Studies Fellowship in Arts and Letters Writer-in-Residence through a collaborative fellowship program with the Chapman Cultural Center and the Hub City Writers Project in Spartanburg, SC.
Desiree is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and the Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas at Austin, where she received her MFA in fiction.
Desiree currently resides in Atlanta, where she is at work on her first novel.