About

Stephanie Nikolopoulos is a writer and editor based in New York City. She is the coauthor, with Paul Maher Jr., of the biography Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” Afar animated her flash travel story “Seeing the Light in Sweden” for their Travel Tales series in 2019, and the Albany International Airport Gallery selected her “Essay after Visiting the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Written from a Skyscraper” for their Landmarks exhibit in 2018. She currently writes the column A Byte Out of the Big Apple for Thomas Insights.

Nikolopoulos also wrote introductions to the reissues of the travel classic A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird and adventure classic Hunting the Grisly by Theodore Roosevelt. As well, she contributed to Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia.

Her personal essays and journalism on travel, visual arts, literature, endangered languages, Greece and Sweden, and New York history have appeared in such publications as BOMBlog, Brooklyn Rail, Gothamist, The Literary Traveler, and The Millions as well as mentioned by The New Yorker (Page-Turner), The Paris Review (On the Shelf), The Huffington Post and other media outlets.

For close to two decades, Nikolopoulos worked as an in-house editor for BarnesAndNoble.com; Barnes & Noble, Inc.; and Sterling Publishing. She was also the visual arts editor for Burnside Writers Collective, where she wrote a column about church architecture called Church Hopping and offered live tours.

She teaches and speaks about writing and publishing at writing festivals and conferences across the Northeast and in the Midwest. Find out how to book her for your conference, school, or library here.

She has given readings at the Bowery Poetry Club, Cornelia Street Café, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and other establishments. To catch her live or to book her, see Appearances.  

Education

Nikolopoulos earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at The New School (New York, NY), where she received a merit scholarship.  Poets & Writers ranked The New School the #1 Creative Nonfiction MFA in New York and #3 in the entire country.  Jack Kerouac studied at The New School, and Nikolopoulos had the opportunity to learn about the writers associated with the Beat Generation through classes with Joyce Johnson and Hettie Jones.

She received a BA in English, with a minor in studio art, from Scripps College (Claremont, CA).  There, she was selected for the Junior Fellows Scholar at the Scripps College Humanities Institute, where she studied the Ancient World.  She was featured in Who’s Who in American Universities and Colleges.

Stephanie went on to receive a Certificate in Editing from New York University (New York, NY), where she took coursework in copyediting, developmental editing, proofreading, and scientific/technical/medical editing.

She also has a Certificate in European Architecture and Art History, which she received from the University of Salzburg (Salzburg, Austria).