Stephanie was born St. Louis, Missouri in the fine year of 1979. She moved to the Chicago area with her parents and younger brother, Daniel in the late eighties. Stephanie got her start like most authors by writing bad poetry about unrequited love and razor blades back in eighth grade. That was also around the time she discovered punk rock. Along with literature by geniuses such as Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Steinbeck, Sylvia Plath, Francesca Lia Block, John McNally, Irvine Welsh, and Louise Erdrich, noisy guitars and lyrics by Kurt Cobain, Johnny Cash, Mike Ness, Courtney Love, Robert Smith, Mark Lanegan, and Brody Dalle are Stephanie's primary influences.
During a dark and angsty period in high school, Stephanie was exposed to Riot Grrrl via punk rock and radical politics long fostered by activist parents and an early interest in animal rights. She wrote several feminist zines including Kill Supermodels, Goddess Defiled, Hospital Gown, and Do Not Go Quietly Unto Yr Grave. Hospital Gown was featured in the book ZINE SCENE by Francesca Lia Block and Hillary Carlip complete with a picture of bleached-blonde seventeen year-old Stephanie. Hillary Carlip was one of Stephanie's earliest writing mentors and they remain friends to this day.
By her first year of college at the extremely liberal Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Stephanie was jaded and goth (though you'll be happy to know that she remained vegan, rediscovered punk rock, her faith in politics, and stopped wearing that white face makeup after a couple years). After one wild year in Ohio, she dropped out of college to "be a writer," but really she just moved to Madison, Wisconsin, drank a lot of boxed wine and went out clubbing for two years. Well, at least it was better than her plan to move to New Orleans and become a stripper. The landscape of Wisconsin also ultimately inspired the setting of her first novel
I WANNA BE YOUR JOEY RAMONEStephanie finally moved back to her hometown of Oak Park, Illinois at the ripe, old age of twenty-one and got her Bachelors in Fiction Writing at Columbia College Chicago. She liked the program and the people she met there so much that she decided to stay for her Masters, which she finished in June of 2006. At Columbia, she was taught by literary luminaries such as Irvine Welsh (TRAINSPOTTING), Joe Meno (HAIRSTYLES OF THE DAMNED), Dorothy Allison (BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA), and Sam Weller (THE BRADBURY CHRONICLES).
Stephanie met her agent, Caren Johnson at Columbia's Story Week in March of 2005 and Caren, along with Fiction Writing Department Chair, Randy Albers, kicked her ass into finishing her first book
I WANNA BE YOUR JOEY RAMONE by February 2006. In the fall of 2005, Stephanie had the experience of taking classes on the CBS Studio Lot in Studio City, CA through Columbia's Semester in LA program. She learned all about adapting books into screenplays. Though she loved drinking at the Viper Room, dancing on tables at Rokbar, celebrity-watching at Chateau Marmont, the beaches of Venice, Santa Monica, and Malibu, and behind-the-scenes Hollywood, Stephanie ultimately decided that LA wasn't her thing. But she does know all about the system now, so don't try to rip her off when you turn her book into a movie.
Stephanie's short stories have been published in 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, f Magazine, Hair Trigger, Black Oak Presents, and on inkstains.org. "Fairytale," an excerpt from her novel
I WANNA BE YOUR JOEY RAMONE that appeared in Hair Trigger 27 was awarded Third Place in Traditional Fiction by the Columbia University Scholastic Press Association. Stephanie's interviews and essays have appeared in No Touching Magazine, Glimmer Train's Writer's Ask, on Virginia Quarterly Review's website, and on freshyarn.com.
Part of Stephanie's heart lies in the Pacific Northwest, particularly Seattle, Washington, where she tries to go at least once a year (and you can read about why in her
www.freshyarn.com/23/essays/kuehnert_ten1.htm , but Chicago is Stephanie's soul, so that is where her body remains. She currently lives in a townhouse decorated with music posters in Forest Park, Illinois, the once-slummy, bar-infested neighbor of Oak Park. Forest Park has been called the next Bucktown, which might be good for Stephanie's property values, but kind of makes her cringe. She shares the house with her boyfriend Scott and three cats, Sidney (whom Stephanie named for Sid Vicious at sixteen), Kaspar, and Lars (named for Lars Fredriksen of Rancid). She recently quit her bartending job to get something respectable with benefits and is currently employed by the UIC College of Nursing, so she now spends far too much time listening to her iPod while commuting on the poorly run CTA.
Oh yeah, and she just finished her second novel,
BALLADS OF SUBURBIA (check it out in the "Backstage Pass section)
www.stephaniekuehnert.com/backstage.html , which is inspired by the near-western suburbs of Chicago, but is in no way autobiographical. While she anxiously awaits the news that somebody wants to publish it, she's at work on her third book (and sometimes a fourth and sometimes a fifth).
Check out photos from before Stephanie became a published author in the "Before They Were Rock Stars" section of the Photo Gallery
www.stephaniekuehnert.com/photos.html .
You can send Stephanie fan mail at stephanie at stephaniekuehnert dot com (the at and dot are spelled out to avoid spammers, you know what to do...), she likes to hear from readers.
