About Stephanie
Stephanie J. Andersen's work is Notable in the 2009 and 2015 Best American Essays and has several times been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Her words have appeared in The Baltimore Review; Brain, Child Magazine; The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Australia's Sydney Morning Herald, Hippocampus Magazine, Literary Mama, Under the Gum Tree, and more.
Inspired by Anne of Green Gables, Stephanie started her writing career when she was eight years old, back when she wore pigtails and pink glasses. Her first attempt at a novel, The Birch Street Brigade, a story of four middle-schoolers trying to solve the mystery of a haunted house, was a wild success, reaching readers all the way from her mom to her best friend (that was pretty much it).
Though she never wrote another mystery, her relationship with words remained fundamental to her as she processed the grief she encountered in adolescence, from the death of her mother to Stephanie's teen pregnancy and the subsequent adoption that separated her from her daughter for nearly ten years. When Stephanie graduated from high school, her father took her to Prince Edward Island, where she filled a glass jar with the red dirt of the roads Anne (with an e) described. With that jar in tow, Stephanie (with an e) returned home, promising herself that one day, despite all she had lost at that point, she too would be a writer and a teacher, just like Anne.
Stephanie's sans the pink glasses and pigtails now and finds the wonder of the world's mysteries less on Birch Street and more in places like her backyard bird feeder, the woods, and the sky. She's never broken a slate over anyone's head (yet), but every morning at 5:00 am (sometimes 5:30 am, let's be honest), for an hour or so, you can find her hunched over her desk (where she still keeps the jar of red earth), writing about mothers and daughters, birds, and all we learn from the wild.
Then, next to a great big old window along the Schuylkill River, she tries not to be distracted by birds while she teaches writers at Reading Area Community College in Pennsylvania. She serves on the local Sierra Club executive board, is a breast-cancer survivor, runner, a clumsy hiker, and just started developing a curiosity about wild mushrooms. She lives in Fleetwood, Pennsylvania with her husband, daughters, dog, cat, and birds (oh, and a backyard squirrel she named Stanley).
"Stephanie Andersen’s nonfiction has everything I love about this genre: page-turning stories, thoughtful reflection, and unforgettable characters. She aims for the heart—and you feel it long after you finish the last sentence."
Jay Varner, author of Nothing Left to Burn
"This: But now we stood ablaze in her words with no desire to put out the flame. That’s how I feel when I read Stephanie Andersen’s prose. I start to read, perhaps tired, perhaps distracted, and every time I am suddenly washed down a chute of emotion that takes me to both tears and hunger to feel more, in seconds. I am grateful and challenged and inspired and devastated and several other things by the end of any of Stephanie’s pieces. Her work doesn’t feel merely ‘literary’—it feels like the human heart pounded into an injection of words, of which you feel the prick and the rush, and you smile and weep."
Eli Hastings, author of Clearly Now, the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Other Trips
“Stephanie’s writing is honest and authentic. Woven with vivid detail and well-drawn scenes, readers will remember her stories a long time after a first—or second—reading.”
Marcelle Soviero, Editor in Chief, Brain Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers
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