ABOUT EVAN
Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan
Evan James is the author of I’ve Been Wrong Before: Essays and Cheer Up, Mr. Widdicombe: A Novel.
Evan is an award-winning writer whose personal essays and fiction have appeared in such publications as Oxford American, Travel + Leisure, and The New York Times, among others. He received an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has received fellowships from Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Carson McCullers Center, The Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, The University of Iowa, and the Lambda Literary Writers’ Retreat, where he was a 2017 Emerging LGBTQ Voices Fellow.
His essay “A Role I Was Born to Play” was selected and read by Tan France of Netflix’s Queer Eye for The New York Times’ Modern Love podcast. Listen and read here.
As an editor-at-large for The Iowa Review, he put together a special portfolio of surrealistic art and writing, “Americana Fantastica,” for the Winter 2019/20 issue.
He has taught at The University of Iowa, The Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, and Victoria University of Wellington. He also taught for four years at Pierrepont School in Westport, CT, where he established and developed the school’s creative writing program. Born in Seattle, he now lives in New York and teaches in the First-Year Writing program at The New School.
He can be found on Instagram at @evanmichaeljames.