The author of five books, including the award-winning memoirs Mexican Enough and Around the Bloc, Stephanie has won a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Viebranz Professorship at St. Lawrence University, the Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, and a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Gold Prize.  She now teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

“I know what you’re thinking.

Do I really want to do this? Spend the next three years of my life in a cornfield that’s smothered in snow half the year? On a $17,000 salary? To study a form that most people confuse with the 5-paragraph monstrosities they were forced to write in junior high? I’ll have to quit my job, the one with health and dental insurance. I’ll have to leave behind my partner, the one I could conceivably marry or at least cohabitate with long into the foreseeable future. I’ll be the youngest/oldest person in the program, the only one who is gay/Black/unpublished/a single parent/secretly a poet. And my writing: it’s going to get crucified!

This is what we all were thinking when we applied to Iowa. We came anyway, and here’s what happened. Not only did we read the major players of our genre—John McPhee, Pico Iyer, Maggie Nelson, Margo Jefferson, Gretel Ehrlich, Nick Flynn—we also took seminars with them and got drinks together afterward. We flew to Greece and the Philippines for summer writing workshops, to France and Venezuela for research, and to Australia and Singapore for conferences. We studied Chekhov with Allan Gurganus, the Old Testament with Marilynne Robinson, the history of the essay with John D’Agata, memoir with Patricia Foster and Honor Moore, and the radio essay with Jeff Porter. We learned teaching techniques from Bonnie Sunstein and employed them immediately afterward in our own classes. We caught readings nearly every night of the week, plus gave a few ourselves. And we wrote and we wrote and we wrote and we wrote—about the drug war and trees, about nuclear test sites and Liberace, about sex work and birds, about electroshock therapy and baseball. About mothers and uncles and selves. Three years later, our class had four book contracts in hand. Within a year of graduation, we added two tenure-track professorships, five university teaching positions, a year-long writing fellowship, and a job at a top publishing house.

Do I really want to do this?

You do. For art, for meaning, for growth, for pleasure. You do.”