Uplifting author conversations with a panel hosted by Latina Surge. Among the topics, Stephanie shared her motivation on writing Event Horizon, the book she wanted to write 20 years ago but needed the journey to get there. Listen to the recording here of this well curated panel of different genre authors. Stephanie comes in around 44 minutes.
Get introduced to Event Horizon: Stories of No Turning Back in our first interview with the event that helped us with our cover reveal, via LatinaSurge!
“We will celebrate the literary works in a sequenced marathon interview, author to author, from 7:30pm to 9:15pm ET on January 23rd of published and award-winning Latine authors : Valeria Aloe – Uncolonized Latinas Paul Sangillo, Esq. – The Golden Prison Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos – Event Horizon Refugio A. Atilano – The Latino Leadership Playbook”
(no registration required)
https://www.linkedin.com/events/latineauthormarathonevent-latin7153198401323429889/theater
At long last, the delight of sharing our lead cover for Event Horizon: Stories of No Turning Back. Karen S. Darboe’s cover captures so much of the female voice, Stephanie’s voice, in this book.
We hope you join us for an April 9th Kickstarter launch–the crowdfunding that will spark Even Horizon into the world, with exclusives to early backers. It’s a bit away for you (not for us organizing it), but we still have lots of fun things to share as we jump to the next black hole in our journey. Read more about this collection.
Pre-register to be notified of our launch in April and you get free stickers with stunning art with your pledge. https://januspointpress.com/eventhorizon/
We’re doing a cover reveal for Event Horizon: Stories of No Turning Back! In true Janus fashion, it’s happening in the future, but we in the past are trying to catch up to it. The cover is making its debut at an upcoming event Stephanie is a panelist on with the non-profit Latina Surge. While it begins to circulate in social media our Instagram page is doing a striptease of its own with it on our spacetime grid there. How can you play along?
Happy space hunting. Watch out for black holes (close cousin to, if not the same thing as, wormholes).
We are so excited about this book.
Teased art BLUSTERONE and Eric Nguyen
Videography by Cyrus, Stephanie Editor
Song: Pretty Carolina by Jontha Links via Canva
We’re happy to share that we’ll be releasing Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos’s August 10th 2022 lecture “Jean, Janus & Comic Book Realism” delivered at the Chautauqua Institution upon receiving the Janus Prize, in both chapbook and ebook form. Chock-full of craft, comic book realism, family history, historical notes for Puerto Rico and Nuyorico, and astrophysics from a fangirl–the lecture is an exploration of literary craft and labels that exist within, and in defiance of, the eye of an observer.
While weaving in and out of what is fiction and what is family memoir in one particular story, the lecture also demonstrates pop culture as a new modern myth in language and experience, the vehicle of science fiction in mediums of comics and prose, and different faucets of marginalization, including in publishing, with a particular focus on the Latino/a/x/e and Puerto Rican/Nuyorican experience.
Great for classroom reads of “Jean”, those with an interest in Latinx literature, and fans of small press and chapbooks.
This printed version includes reference notes for cited works and pop culture, much asked for at Chautauqua.
Publishing October 2023.
Chapbook: ISBN 978-1-958077-05-4
Ebook (pdf): ISBN 978-1-958077-06-1
Curious? You can view the recorded lecture on youtube.
Janus god cart by Aaron Guzman
Spot illustrations by ANDROMEDA
Book Design Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos
An artists’ book. A chapbook. Trademarks. An upcoming collection of prose, comics, canvas work and photography that all come together as a singularity. Our latest newsletter is a look at what we’ve been up to, and what’s on the horizon for Janus Point Press. Written by humans, not AI.
SOME REVEALS on who is joining us on the journey Event Horizon: Stories of No Turning Back. It surely has been an eventful summer.
This includes the special announcement: Janus Point Press and Watch out for wormholes are both now registered trademarks of parent company Zoe Health, LLC.
Some exquisite novels written about Anatolia and The Great Catastrophe
If you mix the backdrops of World Wars, an Ottoman Empire at its sunset–before night—then dawn of the modern state of Turkey, together with a fairly newly liberated nation of Greece redefining itself with strong echoes of its past calling her: Byzantium, idealized cradle of democracy, Constantinople, lands lost… with superpowers playing countries like a chessboard, all this igniting ethnic and religious strife… This and more (a historian would tell you), and you get Smyrna September 13th 1922. Not so long after the Armenian genocide.
Smyrna (now geographically Izmir) was a cosmopolitan city off the coast Asia Minor. Like so much of Anatolia and Ottoman territory, it was multi-ethnic and multi-religious. Many Greeks lived in Asia Minor. Best to read the many books and some pages devoted to what happened on this date–the city was burned, after weeks of about half a million Greeks, and Armenians, huddled on the quay after the Greek army collapsed in its reach East (murder, rape, drowning, forced labor which led to death, suicide by drowning were the lot of these many). It’s referred to in Greek as “The Great Catastrophe”. And the survivors of this tragedy would move on to form a new identity for the modern Greek state together with the forced population exchanges between Turkey and Greece soon after, most of them being Greek. The refugees of Asia Minor brought agrarian skill, middle class professions, worldliness and their own signature to the arts, that would eventually weld itself into a new Greek identity, along, of course with the poverty of uprooted lives. The most famous one you know, is probably Aristotle Onassis.
For The Funeral Singer: Vasili and his sister are refugees from Asia Minor. They both processed what happened and what it means to survive quite differently. Because, yes, one is a man, another a woman. Because of their ages. Because of what they wanted out of life before every day of their lives became Smyrna.
The Funeral Singer the artist’s book in this setting of Smyrna 1922 and Athens 1944, releases September 13th 2022. Order now. The book comes with a silk lapis lazuli book sleeve and a curated reading and arts list bookmark for the themes of this period and culture.
