Book Launch! Jen Bannan, "Tamiami Trail" w/ Sharon Dilworth

We are thrilled to welcome Jen Bannan to White Whale to celebrate her latest short story collection, Tamiami Trail: Miami Stories. Bannan, a Miami native, has been writing about the city for decades. Upon learning about the opening of Alligator Alcatraz, as well as the impending 100th anniversary of the actual Tamiami Trail, she was inspired to bring women’s voices from the region to the fore. Bannan will be joined in conversation by local author and professor, Sharon Dilworth.

“It’s easy to make fun of Florida, hard to understand it, but in these compelling stories Jennifer Bannan beautifully evokes the complex allure of her home city of Miami, from its cypresses, palms, pines, and sawgrass, to its ‘bluster and machismo.’ The teen girls and women in these stories map their own desires and longing onto this treacherous landscape.” Elisabeth Cohen, author of The Glitch

One way into the heart of Miami is the Tamiami Trail, a highway that connects the sprawling, contrary city to the rest of Florida and the country. In her new collection, Jennifer Bannan has the women of Southern Florida in a world bordered by an Everglades prairie, Biscayne Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean—an island on land. Their eighteen stories each start at separate moments in disparate journeys: an adolescent with a violent boyfriend; a middle-aged woman saddled with a good ol’ boy and his swamp buggy; or a successful young businesswoman whose marketing business renames hurricanes for her corporate clients, so that increasing storm damage raises the value of both company stock and her own.

All of Bannan’s women—mothers, daughters, wives, lovers—take long-shot chances in a world that careens between environmental catastrophes, where the expanse of ocean competes with the teeming crowds of Caribbean immigrants, and where a subliminal beat of violence propels stories in barely-contained syncopation. They all have this steamy, improbable place in common.

SHARON DILWORTHthe author of three collections of short stories—The Long White, Women Drinking Benedictine, and Two Sides, Three Rivers—as well as two previous novels My Riviera, and Year of the Ginkgo. Her latest novel, To Be Marquette, takes place in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Sharon has won a National Endowment for Fiction grant, a Pushcart Prize for Fiction, and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Grant. She holds an undergraduate degree from Norther Michigan University, a Master’s Degree from Wayne State University, and an MFA from the University of Michigan. She is a professor of creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University.

JENNIFER BANNAN's latest short story collection, Tamiami Trail: Miami Stories, was released October 2025. Her first collection, Inventing Victor, also from Carnegie Mellon University Press, was published in 2003. She has had stories in the Autumn House Press anthology, Keeping the Wolves at Bay, in literary journals including the Kenyon Review online, ACM, Passages North, Chicago Quarterly Review, Exposition Review, Eclectica Magazine and more. Together with Hattie Fletcher, she is the creator of Thinking Out Loud, a civic engagement reading series that takes place on her front porch in Friendship.

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