There is a photo of Stephanie Ginese when she’s 9 or 10 years old, sitting on the floor at home in South Lorain with a notebook in her lap, writing a story. She can tell you exactly what the story was, if you ask. When she wasn’t writing stories or poems, she was reading a book or listening to books on tape. Her dream? Move to New York, write for Rolling Stone and pen novels.
“I feel I made that dream happen, except that instead of New York I’m in Cleveland, which is cool and cheaper,” she says of her adolescent aspiration. “I’m not at the place where I can write professionally full-time yet, but that definitely remains my goal, and on the path thus far it seems attainable.”
After high school, Stephanie enrolled at Lorain County Community College to become a healthcare professional but left to start a family. She had relocated to Cleveland at 18.
“I became a mom, so that took over my life and I didn’t have much time to think about writing, but literature was still very important,” she says. “I spent every night reading bedtime stories to the kids and instilling that love of literature, and then when they were old enough I started to sample what was going on here in the literary world.”
On a Saturday morning in 2016, Stephanie braved a North Coast blizzard to attend a Literary Cleveland workshop at Cleveland Public Library. Because only a couple people showed up, Stephanie got to spend quality time with the instructor, Kisha Nicole Foster (Cleveland Arts Prize, 2019). The two writers hit it off immediately.
“When I told her I was interested in working with youth and kids who were from similar experiences and environments where I came from, Kisha was like, ‘That’s perfect. Let me introduce you to Twelve Literary Arts,’” Stephanie relates.
She worked with the now-closed organization as a teaching artist and an arts administrator for their full-time team. She became close friends and collaborator with TLA’s “superstar poets” such as Kisha, Siaara Freeman, Ephraim Nehemiah, and Raja Belle Freeman. “I was able to meet so many amazing writers and artists in the city,” Stephanie says. “They were award-winning slam and performance poets, so it was great to write alongside them and get feedback. I feel like that’s where I really honed my skills and my craft.”
Her debut collection of poetry, Unto Dogs, was released by Grieveland in July of 2022 and focuses on themes of Puerto Rican nationalism, history, reproductive violence, and spirituality.
Stephanie has been published in zines, journals, & anthologies throughout the country. She has been a contributor for multiple digital Latinx platforms. Stephanie’s work has been featured in Las Palabritas Journal at Harvard University, The Pinch Journal at The University of Memphis, Homology Lit, Wax Nine Journal, Cleveland Review of Books, and elsewhere.
“Stephanie is an incredibly gifted and courageous writer whose sharp intellect, slick humor, profound sense of history, and muscular femininity came to bear in her book,” says Michelle Smith, programming director for Literary Cleveland. “It is an incredibly beautiful, incisive, and necessary collection of poems that are deeply American, deeply Puerto Rican, deeply beautiful, and deeply real.”
During the pandemic, Stephanie earned her Associate’s degree in Creative Writing from Tri-C and is currently pursuing a BA in English with a minor in history from Cleveland State University. She then plans to pursue an MFA. She is the writer-in-residence at ATNSC, an artist-run gathering space in the Buckeye-Shaker neighborhood of Cleveland.
To appease a long-standing interest in stand-up comedy inspired by “In Living Color” and a flare for humor in her own poetry readings, Stephanie decided to try it for herself. In February she performed at the open-mic night at Lakewood Village Tavern. She is now co-hosting with TJ Maclin a weekly comedy, poetry and music variety show on Sunday nights at Dunlap’s Tavern in Cleveland. All artists are paid.
“I want to work with the community to make this a sustainable place for artists to not just survive but thrive, to not have to worry about working full-time jobs, too,” Stephanie says. “I want to stay in Cleveland and foster that next generation of artists and cultural workers in the city. We’ve got the most talented artists of all expressions right here at home. I want to make sure the rest of the world knows that.”