About
Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos’s critically acclaimed and award winning works can be found in numerous anthologies, magazines, co-creator platforms, and artists’ book forms. Her creative mediums are principally prose, comics, graphic novels, and zines. She creates visual art as ANDROMEDA. Stephanie’s a Manhattanite of Nuyorico, with a heart that sails the Aegean sea. Kirkus Reviews describes her upcoming 2024 debut collection Event Horizon: Stories of No Turning Back as "...should prove a delight for SF aficionados."
Stephanie is the recipient of the 2022 Chautauqua Janus Prize for her story “Jean” and her work has been highlighted by Publishers Weekly, Kore Press, Broken Pencil Magazine, and as a Canzine2021 finalist. Featured at the 2021 AWP Conference & Bookfair as a new voice “transforming the genres” of science fiction and fantasy, Professor Latinx noted her work as “revitalizing the short comic form”.
As a novelist she writes literary and speculative fiction, though ask her and she’ll say she writes comic book realism. Many of her works have been for benefits, including: #GetUsPPE; INSIDER ART: Female & Non-Binary Comic Book Retailer Fund; and the Book Industry Charitable Foundation. She’s the creator of Zine100, a public health benefit zine she successfully funded on Kickstarter, followed up with a stellar preorder launch for Event Horizon. In 2022 she launched Janus Point Press, an imprint with her selected works and a boutique publisher to artist commissioned pieces, artists' books and print collections.
she/her/hers
Featured Work
Event Horizon: Stories of No Turning Back
From the 2022 Chautauqua Janus Prize winner Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos comes a sci-fi, sensual, and literary debut short story collection and like her prize-winning story, “Jean”, genre and medium are not holding her back. Event Horizon: Stories of No Turning Back is a prose-driven collection of stories themed around the astrophysical phenomenon of black holes and their unforgiving boundaries of “no return”—their event horizons. What arises is a tantalizing question for characters grappling with cosmic decisions in their lives, whether in their living rooms, on space stations or exoplanets: what awaits on the other side of the “event horizon”? An array of celebrated artists help answer this through the sequential art of comics, canvas work, and photography. The collection is introduced by comics, prose and astrophysics academia: Dr. Frederick Luis Aldama (Professor Latinx), the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities in the English Department at the University of Texas, Austin; Professor of Astronomy at Columbia University Dr. Marcel Agüeros; and Dr. Mariana Espinosa Aldama, Member of the Mathematical Modeling of Social Systems Department at the Research Institute on Applied Mathematics and Systems at UNAM.
“...Pitsirilos has assembled an eclectic roster of creators from many different mediums, resulting in a work that is diverse in both forms and perspectives… All should prove a delight for SF aficionados.” –Kirkus Reviews
"...By having the courage to place Latinx feminist issues in space and in futuristic settings, Pitsirilos has lifted Latinx literature from the flat earth most of our fiction is set."
–Ernesto Quiñonez, Author of Bodega Dreams
A squatting tenant in El Barrio refusing his landlord’s eviction offer while his nurse contemplates taking a nefarious offer of her own. Star jumping to the next constellation without the girl you love. Stopping a quantum mechanical fungoid Casanova who is ravaging the galaxy’s hearts and star maps.
Whether it be courage, resignation or lust that lead to a decision, one thing is certain:
don’t buckle up because seatbelts don’t work here.
STEPHANIE NINA PITSIRILOS is a writer with critically acclaimed work in numerous anthologies, magazines, co-creator platforms, and artists’ book form. She is the recipient of the 2022 Chautauqua Janus Prize for her story
“Jean,” called “masterful” by Publishers Weekly. She’s recognized as a new voice transforming the genres of science fiction and fantasy and revitalizing the short comic form.
ARTISTS: BlusterOne; Cyrus Amir Boquín; Karen S. Darboe; Cris Delara; Gabriela Downie; Aaron Guzman; Galen Ihlenfeldt; Kroniko; Rafael Romeo Magat; Seth Christian Martel; Eric Nguyen; Anton Oxenuk; Armando Ramirez; Tracy168.
Subject Interests: Literary Fiction, Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Latinxfuturism, Latino Literature, Women’s Fiction, Nuyorico, Puerto Rico, Greece, Space, Black Holes, event horizons, astrophysics, astronomy, Short Stories, photography, style writing, graffiti, abstract art, comics, human sexuality, love stories, romance.
PUBLISHING DEC 15 2024 JANUS POINT PRESS
Other Works
-
Jean, Janus & Comic Book Realism
2023
-
The Funeral Singer
2022
Awards and Recognition
- 2022 Chautauqua Janus Prize
- Broken Pencil Award 2021 Finalist: Best Political Zine: "How To Talk To Welli About Goya."
- KORE PRESS 2015 SHORT FICTION AWARD SEMIFINALIST “The Funeral Singer
Press and Media Mentions
- Chautauqua Institution is delighted to announce “Jean” by Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos as the winner of the 2022 Chautauqua Janus Prize
- Publishers Weekly: Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology. "...Themes of family, migration, and community resonate throughout these 38 masterful stories, as in “Jean” by Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos, which uses wormholes as a metaphor to consider intergenerational trauma."
- Broken Pencil Magazine: "Prolific zinester Andromeda evokes bittersweet nostalgia and the tactility of family photo albums in this one-sheet 8-pager, Maria. In an enigmatic vignette, parcelled out over several hand-cut, hand-pasted typewritten text blocks, a narrator — or perhaps Andromeda themselves — revisits the echo of a long-deceased aunt."
- Alma's Way | Sonia's Way: Mapping Memories of our Favorite Places in Central Park | PBS KIDS
