CITY OF MAGNIFICENT INTENTIONS

City of Magnificent Intentions is a novel about three generations of an American family, wrestling with what's at stake in the distance between the past and the present.

The story of three generations of an American family, wrestling with what's at stake in the distance between the past and the present. Susan, an older white former actress with a lifetime of burned bridges, attempts to reconnect with her daughter, Lisa, and her granddaughters: Cora, a blogger who teaches at a progressive high school, and Nisi, who has been kicked out of her zero-tolerance suburban high school and finds solace in a tumultuous relationship with a senator's teenage son. Halfway across the country, a young man dies in prison, and as they come to understand what his death might mean, all four members of the family come to both reveal and conceal the connection between their family's past and his family's present.

Danielle Evans was born in 1983 in Northern Virginia. She received a B.A. from Columbia University, and an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. BEFORE YOU SUFFOCATE YOUR OWN FOOL SELF was awarded the PEN/Bingham Prize. She has had three stories included in different editions Best American Short Stories. Her short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Public Space, Black Renaissance Noire, Phoebe and The L Magazine. Danielle Evans is an Assistant Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.