In conversation with Danielle Evans

Pulling the delicate threads of “fear and vulnerability, joy and passion, the capacity for love and pain and grief” (The Washington Post), Alice McDermott’s fictional narratives explore intersecting stories of familial love, Irish American culture and assimilation, and the lessons of adulthood. Her novels include Someone; Charming Billy, winner of the 1998 National Book Award; That Night; At Weddings and Wakes; and After This, all of which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. For more than 20 years McDermott was the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and on the Sewanee Writers Conference faculty. She has contributed writing to The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The New York Times, among many other periodicals. In What About the Baby?, McDermott shares a collection of essays inspired from a lifetime of reading, writing, and teaching literature.

Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, winner of the PEN America PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Paterson Prize, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 selection. She teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.