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Stephanie Soileau

Biography

Stephanie Soileau

Stephanie Soileau‘s fiction has appeared in Tin House, Oxford American and Glimmer Train, among other magazines, and has been reprinted numerous times in New Stories from the South. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, as well as an NEA and Provincetown Fellow. Originally from Lake Charles, Louisiana, Soileau now lives in Chicago and teaches at the University of Chicago.

Stephanie Soileau

Books by Stephanie Soileau

Last One Out Shut Off the Lights: Stories
by Stephanie Soileau - Fiction, Short Stories

The 11 stories in LAST ONE OUT SHUT OFF THE LIGHTS feature characters struggling to find a foothold in a world that is forever washing out from under them, people who must reckon with their ambivalence about belonging to a place so continually in flux. We meet a reluctant teenage mother who stows her baby in a closet to steal a night out; a spiteful retiree who sabotages his neighbor in the wake of a hurricane; a Pentecostal singer in a children's theater company who confronts the cultish leader of her troupe; a community of elderly Cajuns who conspire with a family of Sudanese immigrants to hide an escaped cow from the authorities; and a desperate young woman who tries to drag her brother to Mexico for surgery, determined to save his life and her own.