Writer
Podcaster
Speaker
Bio
Niko Stratis is a culture writer based in Toronto, Ontario by way of the Yukon where she spent close to two decades working as a journeyman glazier before coming out as a trans woman in her late 30s and being forced to abandon her previous line of work.
Now in her 40s, Niko provides a unique voice in cultural spaces seeking to work through lifelong traumas and emotional highs and lows through her work.
She has won a Digital Publishing Award for Best Personal Essay, and her work regularly appears in outlets like Spin magazine, Xtra, Paste Magazine and more. Her column in Catapult, Everyone Is Gay, was a widely read series that explored gender and sexuality in 90s music and music criticism, and its impact on her as a closeted queer and trans woman in her teen years. Her newsletter, Anxiety Shark, is a self-published weekly essay collection using music to explore her relationship to themes like gender and sobriety.
Her upcoming debut, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman is set to be released through the American Music Series at the University of Texas Press in spring of 2025.
Niko is also working on her debut novel, Girls of Summer, a punk rock novel about three friends spending a life-altering weekend at the Vans Warped Tour at a dusty Calgary speedway in 2002. The novel examines growing up isolated, lonely and desperate for a connective link to a perfect unknowable place that might tell you exactly who you were meant to be; about understanding your own transness through exposure to something so pure and perfect; queer love, desire and loss.
She lives in Toronto with her fiancé, their dog Bowie and two cats Winona and Ramona. She is a former smoker and a cancer.
Book
The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman
A memoir-in-essays on transness, dad rock, and the music that saves us. Coming May 6, 2025 from the American Music Series at University of Texas Press
“A book that sits beautifully with the bloodiness and bones of a working-class trans life. A wonderfully queer love letter to artists and musicians and all those who have had to bare their souls just to carve out a life in a world that has no place for them. A lesson on how to write yourself alive.”
—Carvell Wallace, bestselling author of Another Word for Love: A Memoir
“Songs can build rooms for us to collapse into when there's nowhere else to go, and songs can bore openings into new universes where we can finally bloom. The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman is a piercing memoir of trans adolescence and young womanhood amid rural Canada's beauty and desolation, and a riveting study of the ways in which music can both tie generations together and cocoon us through difficult becomings. Niko Stratis's expansive, emotive storytelling draws fresh electricity from songs that may well already hold a place in your (or your dad's) personal pantheon. What a joy it is to hear them anew through her ears. If you've ever felt a song look right through you before you could see yourself, this book is for you.”
—Sasha Geffen, author of Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary
For media requests, please reach out to Joel Pinckney : jpinckney@utpress.utexas.edu
