Evaristo has taught creative writing since 1994. She has also been awarded many writing fellowships and residencies including the Montgomery Fellowship at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire in 2015; for the British Council at Georgetown University, Washington, DC; Barnard College/ Columbia University, New York; University of the Western Cape, South Africa; the Virginia Arts Festival (Virginia, USA), and Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia, UK. She taught the University of East Anglia-Guardian "How to Tell a Story" course for four seasons in London up until 2015.[80][81] Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London, having taught at the university since 2011.[67]
Since 1997, she has accepted more than 130 international invitations as a writer. These involve writer residencies and visiting fellowships, British Council tours, book tours, teaching creative writing courses and workshops as well as keynotes, talks and panels at many conferences and literary festivals.[16] She chaired the 32nd and 33rd British Council Berlin Literature Seminar in 2017 and 2018. She delivered the New Statesman/Goldsmiths Prize lecture on 30 September 2020.[82][83] In October 2020, she gave the opening keynote address at the Frankfurt Book Fair's Publishing Insights conference, in which she called on publishers to hire more people represent a wider range of communities: "We have to have people working in the industry from all these communities who are looking for something beyond the cliches and stereotypes."[84]
Evaristo is the Literature Mentor for the Rolex Mentor & Protege Arts Initiative for 2023–2024 mentoring the Ghanaian novelist Ayesha Harruna Attah.[85] Previous arts mentors since the programme began in 2002 include Margaret Atwood, Gilberto Gil, Philip Glass, Sir Peter Hall, David Hockney, Sir Anish Kapoor, William Kentridge, Spike Lee, Phyllida Lloyd, Lin Manuel Miranda, Toni Morrison, Jessye Norman, Yousou N'Dour, Michael Ondaatje, Martin Scorsese, Wole Soyinka, Julie Taymor and Mario Vargas Llosa.[86]
The Complete Works
In 2006, Evaristo initiated an Arts Council-funded report delivered by Spread the Word writer development agency into why black[87] and Asian poets were not getting published in the UK, which revealed that less than 1 per cent of all published poetry is by poets of colour.[24]
When the report was published, she then initiated The Complete Works mentoring scheme, with Nathalie Teitler and Spread the Word.[7] In this national development programme,[88] 30 poets were mentored, each over a one- or two-year period, and many went on to publish books, win awards and receive serious recognition for their poetry.[89][90]
