Meet the Fellows

Desiree S. Evans is an award-winning writer, scholar, and activist from South Louisiana. She writes fiction for children, teens, and adults. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming young-adult fiction anthology The Black Girl Survives in This One (Flatiron Books, 2024), and a contributor to the young-adult fiction anthologies Cool. Awkward. Black. (Penguin Teen, 2023) and Foreshadow: Stories to Celebrate the Magic of Reading and Writing YA (Algonquin Young Readers, 2020). Desiree’s creative writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and has appeared in literary journals such as Gulf Coast, The Offing, Nimrod Journal, and other venues. Her work has received support from the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA/Voices), Kimbilio Fiction, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. 

Desiree was recently the 2021-2022 Gulf South Writer in the Woods, appointed through a residency program of Tulane University’s New Orleans Center for the Gulf South and A Studio in the Woods. She is a 2020 winner of the Walter Dean Myers Grant for children’s fiction awarded by the nonprofit organization We Need Diverse Books. Desiree holds an MFA in creative writing from the Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas at Austin, an MA in international policy from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and a BA in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Desiree currently lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina where she is a Watson Brown Southern Studies Fellow through a collaborative fellowship program with the Chapman Cultural Center and the Hub City Writers Project. Visit Desiree on the web at desiree-evans.com, and on Instagram and Twitter: @literarydesiree.

Sarah Nixon is an independent documentary filmmaker and visual artist. As a storyteller from Raleigh, NC, it is her aspiration to tell stories that center around the American South. She is currently in the production process of working on her first feature-length film, The Benson Five, where she serves as co-director and producer. The Benson Five examines the plight of five young black men who sought to burn down their town’s KKK headquarters building in Benson, North Carolina in the aftermath of Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, and the ways in which the historical memory of the event has lived on in the community since. The film received a 2020 Emergency Research and Development Grant from the Southern Documentary Fund and MacArthur Foundation. She is also co-director and producer in the post-production stages of The Choice to Play, a documentary short that scrutinizes the agency of athletes to assert their rights as citizens to protest and with their celebrated platform, shine a light on society’s injustices.

Sarah has served as a production research intern for a documentary film, Now Is the Time - Healthcare for Everybody (2017), a documentary exploring what single-payer healthcare is and how it saves money. Last year, Sarah served as a production intern for Roadside Entertainment, Inc., researching film topics and pitching ideas for upcoming docuseries.

Sarah was awarded the Reel Digital Artist Award (2020), and a mentorship with the PBS NC Producers Lab (2021). She is also an active member of Brown Girl Doc Mafia (BGDM), an organization that advocates for women and non-binary people of color around the world working in the documentary film industry.

Sarah’s work includes illustration, photography, painting, and video production. Sarah received her bachelor's degree in Art, and Visual Communications from NC Central University in Durham, N.C., and her master's degree in Documentary Film from Wake Forest University, in Winston-Salem, NC. A Maryland native, Sarah comes to Spartanburg as the Southern Studies Fellow (Artist) sponsored by the Chapman Cultural Center and Hub City Writers Project, made possible by grant funding from the Watson-Brown Foundation.