Marian Crotty: NEAR STRANGERS (with Danielle Evans)

Marian Crotty’s new short story collection, Near Strangers, follows the unexpected, inviting lives of queer characters in middle America. Join us to launch it into the world with a conversation between Crotty and Danielle Evans, author most recently of The Office of Historical Corrections! These two brilliant writers of the short story form have much to offer us, as does the collection Near Strangers, through which we can find hopeful, connective themes against the backdrop of the everyday.

Marian Crotty is the author of the short story collections Near Strangers, which won the 2023 Autumn House Fiction Prize, and What Counts as Love, which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her short stories have appeared in venues such as the Kenyon Review, The Sun, Ploughshares, and Best American Short Stories 2020. She has received fellowships or scholarships from Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the US Fulbright Program. She is an Associate Professor of Writing at Loyola University Maryland.

Danielle Evans is the author of two short story collections, The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Her first collection won the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and the Paterson Prize for fiction; her second won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and was a finalist for The Aspen Prize, The Story Prize, The Chautauqua Prize, and The Los Angeles Times Book prize for fiction. She has also been awarded The New Literary Project Oates Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a US Artists Fellowship. Her stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies including four editions of The Best American Short Stories. She is an Associate Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.