Author/Artist Portraits (Photo credit for all: JES)

Book Cover Images

Bios (varying lengths):

~50w:

John Elizabeth Stintzi is the award winning author of the novels My Volcano and Vanishing Monuments, the poetry collection Junebat, and the forthcoming short story collection Bad Houses. Their work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Malahat Review, Kenyon Review, and Best Canadian Poetry. They are at work illustrating their first graphic novel: Automaton Deactivation Bureau.

~100w:

John Elizabeth Stintzi is a writer, cartoonist, and editor who grew up on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario. Their work has been awarded the 2019 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, The Malahat Review’s 2019 Long Poem Prize, the Sator New Works Award, and has been shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and the Raymond Souster Award. JES is the author of the novels My Volcano (longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library’s Book Prize for fiction, and named a book of the year by Kirkus Reviews and the New York Public Library) and Vanishing Monuments, the poetry collection Junebat, and their forthcoming collection of stories Bad Houses (Fall 2024). They are also at work illustrating their first graphic novel: Automaton Deactivation Bureau.

Long bio:

John Elizabeth Stintzi (they/she) is a queer Canadian-American writer and artist who grew up on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario. They hold an Honours English degree from the University of Manitoba, as well as a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction writing from Stony Brook University.

In 2019, JES was awarded The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize as well as the prestigious RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers from the Writers’ Trust of Canada. In the spring of 2020, they published their first two books: the novel Vanishing Monuments (Arsenal Pulp Press), and the poetry collection Junebat (Anansi), which were finalists for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and the Raymond Souster award (respectively). Their second novel, My Volcano, was named the winner of the inaugural Sator New Works Award from Two Dollar Radio for new work by an early career writer who identifies as trans or non-binary, and was released in March of 2022 (from Two Dollar Radio in the US, and Arsenal Pulp Press in the commonwealth). My Volcano has been lauded as a “brilliant achievement” by Publishers Weekly, and has received numerous glowing reviews from venues such as The Kirkus Review, The Toronto Star, and Locus Magazine. My Volcano was also longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, and named a book of the year by both Kirkus Reviews and the New York Public Library. It came out in Italian with Edizioni Tlon in May of 2023, and is forthcoming in Spanish in 2024. In fall 2023, they also released a new poetry chapbook titled Flamingos in the Greenhouse, and their first collection of short stories Bad Houses is forthcoming in fall of 2024.

JES’s work varies widely in both subject and form, and has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, The Watermill Center in Water Mill, NY, the Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, and Queens University in Kingston. Their work has been featured at festivals like Mission Creek Festival (Iowa), the Vancouver Writers Festival, Kingston Writers Fest, Thin Air Writers Festival (Winnipeg), Toronto International Festival of Authors, and others. A selection of their work has appeared in venues such as Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Fiddlehead, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Malahat Review, and Black Warrior Review.

Alongside writing, JES is also an illustrator, graphic designer, freelance editor, and a film photographer. They currently live in Kansas City, Missouri, with their wife and their terrier Grendel, where they teach writing and literature at the Kansas City Art Institute and edit poetry for Contemporary Verse 2. They are currently at work on several new novels while also writing and illustrating a sci-fi graphic novel titled Automaton Deactivation Bureau.