A Short Bio

Stefan Koski is the author of Miscellaneous Philosophy: The Underclassman Years, a humorous satire detailing a day in the life of a high school sophomore. He has been featured in The Litchfield County Times, The Bristol Press, "Between the Covers" on WAPJ Torrington, Radio-Uncensored, MaltaMedia, CBS News Blog, The Saarlander Top 100, The Tattoo Teen Newspaper, BookPleasures.com, BooksoftheYear.com, and Myshelf.com. He is also the head of Terryville Kids Productions, a film group that has created Judak, JDC Energy Drink!, Untitled Public Service Announcement, and The Compassion of Miguel del Fuego videos. He's currently a junior at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.

A Longer Bio

I grew up in the small town of Terryville, Connecticut. How small is small? About 12,000 people. It's not a rural place in the truest sense of the term. Terryville is surrounded by many other towns which are themselves surrounded by the major cities of the east coast--New York to the southwest, Boston to the northeast. I grew up something of a loner and an outcast. I don't know if that was something that my personality caused me to be predisposed to or if that was a quirk that I fell into over time. Could be both.

Humor (and especially sarcasm, inherited from my mother) was how I combated the fate of being an outsider to most of the cliques and social groups that everyone else fell into. I found a vehicle for that humor in high school when I started writing and creating videos. As I've honed my talent for both I've expanded beyond writing and filmmaking purely for laughs.

I write a lot of things--books, short stories, personal essays, rants, opinion pieces, elegies, general musings, and whatever else comes to mind. I've tried my hand at poetry but I don't think I have any particular talent for it. It's something I usually revert to when I don't know how else to express a thought or an emotion into words. I didn't even think of myself as a writer until I started writing my first book. That's when I first realized my passion for writing. In my sophomore English class I thrived on every creative writing assignment we were given, and I especially liked reading them in front of the class. I've been writing all manner of things ever since.

Anyone who's read my first book knows that I never liked high school. My dream was to get as far away from it as possible after graduating and make a new life for myself elsewhere. When it came time to start applying for colleges my goal was to go to the University of Southern California. I hit a snag though when they decided to not accept me. Instead I wound up going to the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, where a lot of other kids who had been rejected by every other school they applied to ended up.

I often jokingly refer to my studies here as a kind of self-imposed exile, but I genuinely like it here. The weather is fantastic eight months out of the year (during what I like to call "non-summer" in Tucson), I've developed a wonderful group of friends, and I'm in a major I love. I'm currently working toward a Bachelor of Arts in Media Arts. If all goes well I'll be graduating on May 15, 2010.

Besides writing and filmmaking I also like: jazz music by the likes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, and Jamie Cullum; directors Wes Anderson and Shinichiro Watanabe; pasta; photography; books by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Will Leitch, and Orhan Pamuk; gorgeous women; having money (but as a poor college kid I think that goes without saying).