Norristown Author's Memoir Wins At Pacific NW Writer's Conference

Norristown’s own Stephanie Yuhas has published her first memoir, and it’s doing pretty well.

It was just chosen this weekend from a pool of five finalist as the winner of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association’s 2015 Nancy Pearl Book Award.

Yuhas’ “American Goulash” tells the story of a self-described nerd girl trying to fit in after she moves to the United States with her family from Translyvania.

“My family emigrated from Transylvania in the 1970s with nothing but the clothing on their backs,” she said. “They worked hard and never asked for help because they felt it would shame upon our family.”

Yuhas describes how she could never fit into the flourishing style of 1980s America, going to school in “rags” while other kids wore light up sneakers.

“Sometimes I had to wear the same patched-up sweatsuit for over a week, until the teacher would call about its stain or smells. I once purposely went to school wearing a garbage bag because I thought they could pass for MC Hammer pants. I was a real weird kid.”

To escape to a different world where she felt more comfortable, she started creating art. She used crayons borrowed from her grandmother’s job at Howard Johnson and expressed herself through drawings.

Soon, she realized she was good. Very good. She even convinced her classmates to pay her to paint them.

“I had to fight a lot to get people to pay me. It was weird to talk to a bully that was bigger than you and ask him to give you his lunch money. It dawned on me that I had to be more like The Little Mermaid who learned to be human through trial and error. I needed to grow some legs, even if it meant that I had to battle some scary sea monsters along the way.”

Yuhas eventually won a scholarship to attend the Philadelphia University of the Arts, and started her own freelance illustration business soon thereafter.

Her work was featured at a variety of festivals, and her animation made the front page of YouTube and MySpace. By 2006, she became a producer and expanded her work to overseeing other animators.

Yuhas currently lives and works in Norristown, even using her profits from her work to create a non-profit, ProjectTwenty1, which assists other emerging artists as they begin their careers.

She married her husband in Phoenixville’s Colonial Theatre.

For more information about Yuhas’ business, non-profit, and projects, visit StephanieYuhas.com.