>It was the early 1990s. Helene was at an Italian street festival with her mother in her hometown, Jersey City. They were in line to order some food with one man waiting before them. Then, the worker at the counter looked Helene in the eyes and asked her what she’d like.
“I think that guy was here before me,” she said.
“I’m not asking him what he wants. I’m asking you,” she recalled the worker responding.
That’s when Helene realized they did not want to serve the man before her because he was Black.
“It blew my mind. I knew there was racism in Jersey City. But I had never been right in the line of fire of it to see it actually happening in front of me.”
Helene Stapinski’s high-energy personality and strong sentiment against injustices have been the main driving forces in her life and career. Helene grew up with a desire to speak up against wrongdoings — working as a journalist served precisely that purpose.
After writing about this experience at the street festival for The Jersey Journal, where she worked in her mid-20s, she received a myriad of attacks, with people threatening to cancel their subscriptions and the local priest reprimanding her in his sermons. In response to a different piece she wrote around the same time, somebody mailed her the paper with her column wrapped around a used maxi pad.
“I thought to myself, these people are disgusting. I’m leaving.” Helene was craving an escape from the place she grew up in, which was plagued by negative experiences and felt like it was obstructing her own worldview.
Shortly after she moved to Alaska to work at a radio station for a year.
Helene is a journalist and an author of three memoirs, where she unveils various aspects of her life, ranging from the history of criminals in her family to her experience as a drummer in a band during her late 20s. She grew up in New Jersey and began her career at the Hudson Reporter in Hoboken. She later worked as a columnist for The Jersey Journal, her hometown newspaper, often publishing stories that caused controversy within the local community.
She recalls her early adulthood as a time when she felt angry at a lot of things happening around her — both in her personal life and in society as a whole. She used her writing as an outlet for these feelings, and as a tool to fight for social justice.
“I don’t know how much change I’ve made in the writing I did, probably some, but not enough to calm me down,” Helene said.
She believes moving to Alaska for a year was a big turning point in her life, as it was the first time she was taken out of the place where she had been raised.
“It was like being on another planet,” she recalled. “It sort of shook me out of the funk that I had been in. Leaving [Jersey City] was almost like a rebirth in a way. Everything was different. The whole world was different.”
Upon returning from Alaska, she went to pursue her MFA at Columbia University and began working on her first memoir about her family history. “Writing that first book was kind of like therapy for me. It was very cathartic.” Although her works often engage with heavy themes, Helene says she tries to conclude them on uplifting notes.
“She has a fantastic voice, and I think it’s a very unique voice,” said one of her literary agents, Sascha Alper. “She’s funny, too.”
Helene’s most recent book, cowritten with Bonnie Siegler, titled “The American Way: A True Story of Nazi Escape, Superman and Marilyn Monroe,“ was released in 2023. The book was created as a follow-up to a viral New York Times story she wrote about Bonnie’s grandfather, who escaped Nazi Germany in 1938.
“She wrote such a fantastic article. These were stories I’ve had in my family my whole life and to read them through her lens was really amazing,” Bonnie said. She believes Helene’s writing is very inviting. “You just want to keep reading. Every paragraph leads to the next and you are rewarded for your attention.”
Helene always wanted to be a writer, but nobody in her family had pursued a similar path. She recalls a teacher in her freshman year at New York University, where she received her B.A., who recognized her knack for writing and guided her to pursue a career in journalism.
“I got in touch with her later in life to thank her. She really sort of changed the trajectory,” Helene said.
Currently, Helene herself teaches undergraduate journalism at NYU, and continues her work as a freelance journalist and writer. For her, teaching journalism is meaningful in that it constantly reminds her how young people seek to make the world a better place.
“As a writer, you’re making order from the chaos of the world,” she said. “That’s really one of your jobs. That’s what I try to do.”