Desiree S. Evans writes fiction for children, teens, and adults. She is the co-editor of the Indie-bestselling 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.
Desiree grew up in the heart of Louisiana’s Creole and Cajun coutryside, surrounded by sugarcane fields, forests, swamps, and bayous. Her creative and scholarly work often deals with Black life in the American South, with a special focus on the Afro-Creole traditions, folklore, and culture of South Louisiana.
Desiree 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 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. She was most recently a 2024-2025 Steinbeck Fellow, awarded through the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University.
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 lives in Louisiana, where she is at work on her debut novel.