About
Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos’s critically acclaimed and award winning works can be found in numerous anthologies, magazines, co-creator platforms, and artists’ book form. 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.
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. 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
Jean, Janus & Comic Book Realism
The 2022 Chautauqua Janus Prize lecture by author Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos “Jean, Janus & Comic Book Realism”, delivered at the Chautauqua Institution Athenaeum Hotel on August 10th 2022, is now available in both handmade chapbook and ebook form.
Chock-full of craft, comic book realism, family history, historical notes for Puerto Rico and Nuyorico, and astrophysics from a fangirl–the lecture is an exploration of literary craft and labels that exist within, and in defiance of, the eye of an observer.
While weaving in and out of what is fiction and what is family memoir, the lecture also demonstrates pop culture as a new modern myth in language and experience, the vehicle of science fiction in mediums of comics and prose, and different faucets of marginalization, including in publishing, with a particular focus on the Latino/a/x/e and Puerto Rican/Nuyorican experience. This chapbook is great for classroom reads of the short story “Jean”, those with an interest in Latino a/x/e literature, and fans of small press and chapbooks.
Other Works
Awards and Recognition
- 2022 Chautauqua Janus Prize
