Tony D'Souza

Tony D'Souza is an American novelist, journalist, essayist, reviewer, travel and short story writer. He has published three novels with and director Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and in foreign translations: Whiteman (2006), The Konkans (2008), and Mule (2011).

D'Souza was born and grew up in Chicago. He is multiracial with a Mangalorean Catholic father and a Euro-American mother; his mother served in the Peace Corps in India from 1966-1968. Tony studied fiction with the short story writer Janet Desaulniers while an undergraduate at Carthage College, later earned master's degrees in writing from the University of Notre Dame and Hollins University. At Hollins, his friend and mentor was the Canadian poet Eric Trethewey, father of United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. D'Souza received a 2006 NEA Fellowship, a 2007 NEA Japan Friendship Fellowship, a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2011 John Ringling Towers Fund Grant. He also served 2.5 years in the Peace Corps in Côte d'Ivoire where he was a rural AIDS educator. After that program was evacuated in September 2002 due to the outbreak of the Ivorian Civil War, he transferred to the Peace Corps program in Madagascar, where he served an additional six months before leaving the Peace Corps. Three years after leaving Peace Corps/Côte d'Ivoire, his short story, "Club des Amis" was published in The New Yorker. This short story would become a part, a year later, of his first novel Whiteman. D'Souza is a member of PEN, the National Book Critics Circle, the Great Books Foundation, and the National Peace Corps Association. He has two children, Gwendolyn Alice and Rohan Anthony. In 2009, he was honored by the Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of South Florida for his work. In 2011, his work was included in a special Peace Corps collection at the Library of Congress, and he received a commendation from Congressman John Garamendi. In 2014, he was named a Carthage College Distinguished Alumnus.

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