Sofia Quintero is a Gen-X Afro-Latina screenwriter and novelist. Raised in a working-class Puerto Rican-Dominican family in the Bronx, the self-proclaimed “Ivy League homegirl” graduated from Columbia University and began her first career as a policy analyst and advocate working for various nonprofit organizations and government agencies including the Vera Institute of Justice and the Hispanic AIDS Forum. After years of working on diverse policy issues, Sofia turned to cultural work with the intention to meet audiences where they are yet take them someplace better.
Determined to write edgy yet intelligent novels for women who love hip-hop even when hip-hop fails to love them in return, Sofía wrote her debut novel Explicit Content (Penguin 2004) under the pen name Black Artemis. Booklist said of her debut, “Fans of Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever will find this debut novel just as tantalizing. . .” Since Sofia has published six more novels and twice as many short stories and novellas with every major house and across genres – young adult, “chick lit”, erotica and hip-hop noir. Because of her gift for translating complex social issues into accessible and compelling stories, her commercial fiction is assigned in college classrooms across the nation and in multiple disciplines from English to criminal justice. Her Black Artemis novel Picture Me Rollin’ (presently an audiobook narrated by Dascha Polanco) about a Latina ex-offender who’s obsessed with Tupac Shakur has been assigned alongside Asha Bandele’s The Prisoner’s Wife and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
She also has been a teaching artist and youth worker for over two decades for organizations such as Urban Word NYC and the National Book Foundation. Sofia also co-founded Chica Luna Productions which won a Union Square Award for its groundbreaking combination of youth development, arts education and cultural activism. Most recently Sofia served as the Associate Vice President at Girls Incorporated of New York City where she began as a part-time facilitator and mentor to middle school girls in the Bronx, East Harlem and Brooklyn.
Sofia has an MFA from the TV Writers Studio at Long Island University and was an inaugural Made in NY Writers Room Fellow with a TV pilot based on her novel Burn about a Puerto Rican bail bond agent in the South Bronx with a traumatic past and an unorthodox approach to her business. She was a writers assistant on The First, a Hulu original series created by her mentor Beau Willimon and Love After Love, a series in development created by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen for Universal TV. She is presently working on her seventh novel #Krissette. Inspired by the #SayHerName movement to demand justice for Black girls and women murdered by police, #Krissette will be published by Knopf Books for Young Readers in 2023. Sofia is also the co-author of Miss Me With That, a collection of essays by the first Black Bachelorette Rachel Lindsay which will be published in January 2022.
