Marguerite (Maggie) Sheffer’s stories appear in The Cincinnati Review, BOMB, LitHub, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Smokelong Quarterly, among other magazines.  At Tulane University, she teaches courses in design thinking and speculative fiction as tools for social change. She is a founding member of Third Lantern Lit, a New Orleans writing collective. 

Schedule

10:45 am to 11:45 am
A.Z. Young Park, Author Tent B
Southern Currents: Short Stories of Place, People, and Possibility
Robert Busby, Bodock: Stories
Toby LeBlanc, Soaked: Stories
Marguerite Sheffer, The Man in the Banana Trees: Stories
with moderator Chris Tusa

Noon to 12:45 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

The Man in the Banana Trees: Stories

PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection 2025, Finalist
A Debutiful “Most Anticipated Debut Book of 2024”
One of Electric Literature’s Most Exciting Debut Short Story Collection of 2024
Named a Best Book of 2024 by Debutiful and Electric Literature

The stories in The Man in the Banana Trees take place in the past, present, and future—from the American Gulf South to the orbit around Jupiter. We meet teachers and students, ghosts and aliens. An ice cream consultant in the year 2036 predicts a devastating flavor trend and a disgruntled New England waiter investigates a mysterious tanker crash. Although wildly varied in setting, length, and genre, a thread of the fantastic unites these stories, as characters struggle to understand that thing lurking at the edge of their perception: something sinister, or maybe—miraculous.