"Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self" author reading at Penn State Behrend October 6, 2011

Fiction writer Danielle Evans, whose first short story collection, “Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self,” was championed as a must-read by O Magazine, Kirkus Review, and Entertainment Weekly, will appear in the Creative Writers Reading Series at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, on Thursday, Oct. 6.

Evans’ reading takes place at 6 p.m. in the college’s Larry and Kathryn Smith Chapel; an author’s reception will be held at 5:30 p.m. Both events are free and open to the public, and free parking will be available in the college’s Junker Center lot.

“Own Fool Self” co-won the 2011 PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, won the 2011 Paterson Fiction Prize, and is a nominee for the 2011 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. Evans’ work has appeared The Paris Review, A Public Space, Callaloo, and Phoebe, and has been anthologized in “The Best American Short Stories” 2008 and 2010 and in “New Stories from the South.”

Evans holds an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop and was the 2006-07 Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She now teaches literature and creative writing at American University in Washington D.C.

Penn State Behrend’s annual Creative Writers Reading Series is produced by the college’s B.F.A. in creative writing degree program with support from the Clarence A. and Eugenie Baumann Smith Fund. For more information about the series, phone the Penn State Behrend School of Humanities and Social Sciences at 814-898-6108.