About Stephanie

Stephanie’s extended family’s roots in Greece, Peru, and Asia have shaped her journey as an author, lawyer, and performing artist.

The journey began in Chicago, where she was born. Though her first language was Greek, English followed rapidly. When she was five, and someone asked, “What’s your name, little girl?” she answered, “Judy Garland.” Her immigrant grandmothers were horrified.

She grew up, earned degrees in comparative literature and music from Brown and Yale, and went to New York for a career on and off Broadway – there creating the role of The Critic in the Tony Award-winning musical Nine, and writing songs and scripts produced at Manhattan Theatre Club, Playwrights Horizons, Writers Theatre, and other spaces.

To her family’s relief, Stephanie returned to Yale for a law degree and joined a New York firm. She and her late husband formed a family with Scottish, Greek, and Indigenous Peruvian ancestry. After his death, she moved with her small son to Maine.

She kept writing: legislative drafting, opinion pieces, strategic documents for nonprofits, poetry, fiction. As consultant and Interim Executive Director of Portland Ballet, she returned full circle to the arts and soon after, was accepted into The Writers Hotel conference in Manhattan, joining U.S. and international peers. 

Stephanie is now author of the novella My Xanthi, essayist in Beacon Press' award-winning anthology Breaking Bread: Essays from New England on Food, Hunger, and Family, Story of the Week author and finalist in Narrative Magazine's Fall 2022 Story Contest, and published finalist in Mississippi Review’s 2019 Prize in Fiction. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in print and online venues including McSweeney’s, The New Guard, and various media. A 2023 Sewanee Writers Conference member, she was previously Katahdin (Patrice Krant) Fellow in residence at Storyknife’s inaugural retreat for women writers in Alaska.

Were they alive today, Stephanie’s grandmothers might look askance at her traveling thousands of miles to Alaska to write. It’s unlikely they could read anything she has written. Yet she hopes they would be secretly proud – not least because she doesn’t answer to “Judy Garland” anymore, but to the name of her lineage.