Author Night: New Orleans Women Authors

Marguerite Sheffer, Annell Lopez, and Vanessa Saunders

Three local fiction authors read from their debut books: the short story collections "The Man in the Banana Trees" and "I’ll Give You a Reason," and the novel "The Flat Woman."

Marguerite (Maggie) Sheffer is a Professor of Practice at Tulane University, where she teaches courses in design thinking and speculative fiction as tools for social change. Formerly, she taught English at the East Oakland School of the Arts, Castlemont High School, Life Academy, and GW Carver High School. Her debut short story collection, The Man in the Banana Trees, was selected by judge Jamil Jan Kochai for the Iowa Short Fiction Award. It was also a Debutiful Best Debut Book of 2024, and one of Electric Literature’s Most Exciting Debut Short Story Collections of 2024. 

Annell López is a Dominican immigrant. She is the author of the short story collection I’ll Give You a Reason, winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, from the Feminist Press. A 2022 Peter Taylor fellow, her work has received support from Tin House and the Kenyon Review Workshops and has appeared in American Short Fiction, Michigan Quarterly Review, Brooklyn Rail, The Common, Refinery29, and elsewhere. López is an Assistant Fiction Editor for New Orleans Review and received her MFA at the University of New Orleans. She is working on a novel.

​Vanessa Saunders teaches as a Professor of Practice at Loyola University New Orleans, and was the editor-in-chief of Helium Journal from 2013 to 2016. Her writing has appeared in Seneca Review, Sycamore Review, Los Angeles Review, Nat. Brut, Entropy, PANK, Passages North, Stockholm Review of Literature and other journals.​​ Her debut novel, The Flat Woman, won FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. Compared to Kafka's Metamorphosis, The Flat Woman is a humorous novel that explores climate change through the lens of feminism and raises questions about personal responsibility in times of mass disaster. 

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