Ann Anderson Evans

Ann Anderson Evans is made of what she has been: professor, troubadour, teacher of ESL, business owner, wanderer, Christian Scientist, Episcopalian, Unitarian-Universalist, student, linguist, accomplished cook, swimmer, legal secretary, farm hand, wife, wife again, wife again, twice a mother. Today, she’s a writer, a Buddhist, a gardener, a book reviewer, a pickleball player. Her adventures are mostly literary.

Her BA from New York University was in French and Spanish. She has an MA in English from NYU, and another MA in Linguistics from Montclair State University where she taught freshman writing for many years. She delighted in teaching prospective English majors as well as the soccer team, the engineers and scientists, the philosophers, and the reluctant ones.

Her first book, DARING TO DATE AGAIN (SheWrites Press, 2014) won multiple prizes for memoir. Short stories, academic work, essays, and book reviews have been published widely.

Ann’s second memoir, THE SWEET PAIN OF BEING ALIVE (Austin Macauley, 1/5/24) is the highly anticipated sequel to DARING TO DATE AGAIN. . (Tiffany Haddish won) Ann didn’t think much about secrets until she woke up one morning and found her husband Terry dead of suicide. They were both healthy and seemingly happy, so she was blindsided. As she made her way toward uncovering the reason why he had left this life, she changed the way she viewed gender, sex, marriage, right, wrong, good, and bad. Her narration of the book secured her (and her audio engineer Roy Yokelson of Antland Productions) a nomination by SOVAS for Best Narration by an Author in 2024.

The next and final leg of the memoir trilogy, THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY, pays homage to Henry James’s book of the same name. As a child, Ann, like her friends, had no future ahead of her other than marriage, and when she hasn’t managed to marry by the time her friends were having babies, she leaves America to see how things are done in other countries and lived for eleven years in Spain, Israel, Italy, and Greece. Like James’s protagonist, Isabel Archer, her trusting American nature proves no match for the more conspiratorial nature of older cultures. She returns home a more seasoned and sophisticated woman. 

She is also writing a novel about a woman coming of age in Greenwich Village in 1963. Unsure which of the above two books will get out there first.

Her short stories have been published in Entropy, The Opiate, Pulse, Phantasmagoria, Forge, Under the Sun, Ozone Park Journal, Phoebe, The Raven’s Perch, Words & Images, Pedagogy, and Better Than Starbucks; book reviews have appeared in The Literary Review, Midwest Book Review, The Laurel Review, and PANK. Her story, “Precious Love”was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her academic work has been published in Pedagogy and on Kindle.

Follow Ann on Substack (https://vintagewisdomannandersonevans.substack.com), on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ann.evans.9849), or on Bluesky (annandersonevans.bsky.social).

She lives with her Sealyham Terrier in Vermont and runs a short story contest for middle schoolers in her hometown Montclair, New Jersey, which takes her there several times a year.

Media

Ann has appeared on television, radio and podcasts, with appearances on The Discovery Channel’s Sex in America special, NPR Author’s Corner, The Author’s Show, ArtistFirst, KGUA, Gualala, California, JenningsWire, Beyond Fifty Radio: Daniel Davis, Kim Power Stilson, Donna Seebo Show and The Michael Dresser Show. She shares her experiences and insights using a well-traveled lifetime and a sense of humor and joy on topics such as what makes a memoir tick to her views on marriage, suicide, gender dysphoria, aging, sex, and patriotism. She had been interviewed several times by Sangita Myska, a popular host on the British radio talk show network, LBC.

She is currently available for media appearances (TV, radio, print, and online). Please send Ann details about your appearance request and inquire about availability.