LOOK BACK AT IT

Look Back at It, the long-awaited novel by the beloved PEN / Robert W. Bingham Prize winner, is about celebrity, performance, the politics and theatrics of celebrating and grieving black women, the distance between the nineties and the present, the shifting landscape of fame, and the price of becoming yourself.

In the summer of 2019, with her 40th birthday and the twentieth anniversary of her debut solo album on the horizon, Aida, once the world's best known black pop star, is working on a documentary to celebrate her career highlights while staying a step ahead of her fear of being called irrelevant. Aida has maintained an enormous and loyal fan base, and developed a reputation for being able to level up and reinvent herself whenever people think she has peaked. While her cheekily titled “Look Back At It” documentary is meant to be lighthearted and showcase a woman still at the top of her game, the summer presents a series of more urgent complications.

About the Author
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 of Best American Short Stories. Her short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Public Space, Black Renaissance Noire, Phoebe and The L Magazine. Danielle is an Assistant Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.