Stephanie Kuehnert

Stephanie Kuehnert made her fiction debut with the critically acclaimed I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone. She got her start writing bad poetry about unrequited love and razor blades in eighth grade. In high school, she discovered punk rock and produced several D.I.Y. feminist 'zines. She received her MFA ... (more)in creative writing from Columbia College Chicago and lives in Forest Park, Illinois. Visit her website at www.stephaniekuehnert.com.

Ballads of Suburbia
Join us for this special party celebrating the release of Chicagoan Kuehnert’s (I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone) second novel, Ballads of Suburbia. Oak Park high school student Kara helps maintain the “Stories of Suburbia” notebook, containing newspaper articles of the bizarre ... (more)and tragic from suburbs everywhere, as well as the “ballads” written by her friends -- the heartbreakingly honest tales of the moments when life changes and a kid is forced to grow up too soon. Before Kara could figure out what her own song was about, she had to leave town after a series of disastrous events at the end of her junior year. Four years later, Kara returns to face the music, and tells the tale of her first three years of high school with her friends’ “ballads” interspersed throughout.

Join us for a rock-solid night of great writers! Joe Meno reads his latest collection of stories, Demons in the Spring. Chris Connelly reads from his memoir as a singer for the Revolting Cocks, Concrete Bulletproof Invisible and Fried: My Life as a Revolting Cock. Stephanie Kuehnert reads her new novel ... (more)about growing up punk, I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone. Jolene Siana reads from her published teenage letters to Ogre, the singer from Skinny Puppy, Go Ask Ogre: Letters from a Deathrock Cutter.

Stephanie Kuehnert got her start writing bad poetry about unrequited love and razor blades in eighth grade. In high school, she discovered punk rock and produced several D.I.Y. feminist 'zines. Stephanie received her MFA in creative writing from Columbia College Chicago. Her debut novel, I Wanna Be Your ... (more)Joey Ramone, a raw, edgy emotional tale about growing up punk and living to tell. was released by MTV Books in July 2008. It has been hailed as "a wonderfully written and evocative story of a mother and daughter parted by circumstance and joined by music" by Irvine Welsh, "acidly incisive and full-out entertaining" by Booklist, and "...an empowering new twist on a girl's coming of age..." by the Los Angeles Times.

A raw, edgy, emotional novel about growing up punk and living to tell.