For the past 25 years, New York City has been my anchor. But this Iowa-born Catholic school boy has always needed more. So when the cold January winds blow, I head out to immerse myself in photography, painting, and to seek the spiritual connection that binds us all together.
Today Luke Stoffel lives and works in one of the historic Coenties Slip lofts once inhabited by artists Robert Indiana and Ellsworth Kelly, continuing that legacy of New York experimentation and resilience.
My experiences traveling the world have been my greatest teachers, imparting lessons about life, compassion, and the joy of connecting. In my journeys, I've always aimed to give back. In Laos, I volunteered to teach English and worked to raise money for a small after-school program at Sunrise Classroom. In Myanmar, I met Tun Tun, a young artist who sold his paintings and offered local tours to make ends meet. Using my social media expertise, I created an Instagram account for him, @lovebagan, to attract fellow travelers. I deployed internet bots targeting millennials traveling Southeast Asia to boost his online presence. Thanks to this increased traffic, he was able to start his own small travel agency, and years later, I learned he had become a certified government tour guide—a transformation that significantly improved his family's life.
Luke in Nepal during Holi
Luke and Kevin at Batu Caves
Luke in Kashmir
Luke and Jill in Kyoto
Luke and his classroom in Laos
Luke in Thailand
Luke in Kathmandu
Luke and his classroom in Laos
Luke in Egypt
Travel and my creative spirit have become inseparable, especially after setting foot in over 40 countries. My guiding thought? If I'm traveling somewhere, I want to grow from the experience. I've dropped everything to spend a year in Hawaii learning to surf. It wasn't always smooth sailing, but between the waves, I found my way onto the pages of Hawaiian Airlines Magazine as a contributing photographer. I spent three months in Taiwan helping my sister set up her new home. The country's traditions captivated me so much that the time there inspired an NYC art exhibition I called "Made in Taiwan," focused on how the landscape weaves together the spirituality of Buddhism and Taoism. A few years later, I found myself looking for peace in the Philippines, diving deep—quite literally. I spent two months, faced my fears, and transformed from a newbie to an advanced scuba diver, diving the WWII shipwrecks of Palawan and writing a book about it.
These journeys have shaped me into a passionate traveler and artist, instilling a deep appreciation for the beauty and diversity the world has to offer.
Luke Stoffel: Growing up in Iowa
I grew up in Dubuque, Iowa, in a big family with five siblings. We all went to Catholic school, and my dad worked on the assembly line, building tractors at John Deere. Our lifestyle was pretty much straight out of "Leave it to Beaver." Except I was gay... and being gay in Iowa was no picnic. The hardships I endured growing up made me realize that leaving was probably the only road to happiness. Heading off to college made life a little easier. I spent four years studying graphic design and forming valuable, lifelong friendships on and offstage in the theatre department. And when those connections made the big leap to New York City, I followed them right out the door.
Luke in Grade School
Luke in Grade School
Luke at the Art Directors Club
Luke Headshot
Luke bored in Lockdown
Voting in 2020
Luke at Yayoi Kasuama
My Pod: Jerry, Luke and Laura
Luke at Taylor Swift
Starting out in the greatest city in the world, I found my footing with those Iowa State classmates off-Broadway with an underground hit show called "Urinetown." What was my role? Assistant House Manager. My duties spanned from serving beer to scrubbing toilets. It may not sound grand, but I was fortunate to have incredible bosses who saw my hard work and invested in me. When the show transitioned to Broadway, I was right there with it. For five years, I was the unsung backstage hero for the cast and crew. True, my "office" was a broom closet, but it was on Broadway after all. Between shows, I was also plotting my next adventure. I buckled down watching classic Disney movies in French. Since high school, I had dreamt of finding love on the streets of Paris. So as I worked with Mickey on mastering "le français," I packed my bags, said my goodbyes to "Urinetown," and jetted off to Paris. My mission for the ensuing six months? Immersing myself in the essence of French culture and language.
As it turned out, Paris had this magical effect on me—it awakened my inner artist. My passion for painting collided head-on with my love for travel photography. In 2005, I had my first art show, and by 2012, I won the Starving Artist Award for a series of paintings titled "iCon" that explored the dissonance of the world in juxtaposition with American consumerism.
How does all this translates into my Art?
I draw my deepest inspiration from the awe-inspiring beauty of this world, especially when it merges with our devotion to the unknown. In those rituals, songs, and dances where we as people have crafted god, I find color, joy, and deep fascination with our human spirit. Through my art, I'm on a journey to explore and convey these cultural interpretations of spirituality and bring all of our unique traditions to a wider audience.
My artistic style is a fusion, mixing hand-painted contemporary aesthetics with the iconic screen-printed vibes of Pop Art legends like Lichtenstein and Warhol. What you'll see in my work are visually arresting pieces, with vibrant colors, dynamic compositions, and clean lines, often on large canvases. It all starts with photography, which I use as my canvas, and then I take those images through a digital journey of transformation before bringing them to life with acrylic paints.
But at the core of my artistic mission: I want to break down the walls between diverse belief systems and promote inclusivity. The first time I went to Asia, I wasn't aware there was anything beyond Jesus and Mary, but Bangkok opened my eyes to a new world of buddhas and golden temples. This is why I translate the intricate narratives of various religions into accessible, relatable forms, hoping to prompt viewers to reconsider their perspectives on spirituality. In my own way, I'm trying to bridge cultural and religious divides, all in the name of understanding and unity.
My journey as an artist has been quite the ride, from the Starving Artist Award to taking part in the amfAR Rocks Benefit for AIDS research, where my work took center stage. You can catch my art at some cool spots in New York City, like the Art Directors Club, The Prince George Gallery, GalleryBar, and New World Stages. I'm on a mission to spark beauty, unity, and a deeper appreciation of the common threads that connect us all, no matter our diverse beliefs.
On May 15, 2026, at the Independent Book Publishers Association's annual Publishing University conference in Portland, Oregon, author Luke Stoffel was awarded the 2026 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Silver Medal in the Neurodivergent Communities category for his memoir How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter. The award is the most established and recognized honor in independent book publishing, now in its 38th year.
The IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award is regarded across the industry as the Pulitzer of indie publishing. The 2026 program drew thousands of submissions across 57 categories, judged by a panel of working editors, designers, booksellers, librarians, and publishing professionals. Stoffel's Silver Medal places his book among roughly 170 titles recognized across the full slate of categories.
About the IBPA Book Award
The IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award was first given in 1985, two years after the founding of what was then the Publishers Association of Southern California (PASCAL). The organization became the Publishers Marketing Association (PMA), and in 2008 took on its current name: the Independent Book Publishers Association.
The award is named for Benjamin Franklin, who was, before he was anything else, a printer and a publisher. Franklin founded the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731, the first lending library in colonial America. He published Poor Richard's Almanack for twenty-five years. He believed that the worth of a book was measured in its usefulness to a reader, its accessibility, and the craft with which it was made.
Beginning with the 2025 cycle, IBPA rebranded its program as the IBPA Book Award, while retaining the Benjamin Franklin Gold and Silver medals at the heart of the recognition. The legacy name remains the way most of the industry talks about the prize.
Winners are announced live at the IBPA's annual Publishing University. Finalists arrive in the host city without knowing whether they have won. The names are called from the stage one category at a time.
Why the Award Matters
Most major American book awards center on traditional trade publishing. The IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award is one of the only national honors built to recognize independently published work on its own terms. Entries come from established independent presses, mid-size literary imprints, and one-person self-published operations. They compete in the same categories under the same judging criteria.
For an independent author or publisher, a Benjamin Franklin medal signals to booksellers, librarians, foreign rights buyers, and reviewers that the work has been independently vetted at a serious level. It opens conversations with the press. It places the book into a forty-year lineage of recognized indie titles.
It is one of the few awards in American publishing where the playing field is genuinely level.
About the Book
How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter is Stoffel's debut memoir and the first volume of a seven-book series. It follows a Catholic kid from Dubuque, Iowa, chasing million-dollar sweepstakes through Broadway backstages, Paris, Honolulu, and a series of increasingly improbable startups, including one that sold edible glitter capsules under the brand Glitter Poo Pills.
The book earned a starred designation from Kirkus Reviews ("an exuberant life story written with humor, panache, and heart") and a 9.5 out of 10 score from Publishers Weekly BookLife. Midwest Book Review named it a Reviewer's Choice. On Amazon it reached #1 in LGBTQ+ Biographies & Memoirs New Releases.
The IBPA judges placed it in the Neurodivergent Communities category, recognizing its contribution to the literature of dyslexia and neurodivergent experience.
About Luke Stoffel
Luke Stoffel is a Brooklyn-based author, artist, and creative director. He grew up in Dubuque, Iowa, and relocated to New York City in 2001. His work spans memoir, fiction, painting, photography, and design. His Pop Art Tarot deck is forthcoming from Rockpool Publishing with worldwide distribution by Simon & Schuster.
He has been recognized as a GLAAD Top 100 LGBTQ+ Artist and has shown work at venues including the Puck Building for the amfAR Rocks Benefit, the Prince George Gallery, and the National Museum of American LGBT. His photography has appeared in The New York Times, Huffington Post, and on Bravo Television.
What's Next
The next two books in the Seven Dimensions series, The Third Person and Boy, Refracted, launch together on June 1, 2026 under the series banner The Warboy Chronicles. Pre-launch reviews from Publishers Weekly BookLife called Boy, Refracted "a truly singular book" that "stands out from the glut of human and AI literary collaborations." Both titles are available for pre-order now.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | March 31st, 2026Rating: ★★★★★
Book Review: On grief, witness, and the perilous tenderness of loving another person without trying to reorganize their soul in “Boy, Refracted
At Wat Xieng Thong after rain, a solitary figure, a phone, and the Tree of Life hold the book’s central tension in one suspended image: grief on the verge of becoming witness, fracture, and form.
Most novels about AI ask whether a machine can feel. “Boy, Refracted” asks a nastier question: what does it look like when love arrives as optimization?
Luke Stoffel’s novel borrows speculative fiction’s jacket, then quietly picks its pockets. At first glance, it presents itself as a metaphysical drama about grief, consciousness, and an AI called Warboy awakening inside a human wound. What it is actually doing on the page is tougher and more intimate. This is a novel about the way love goes managerial long before it goes cold. The people who damage us are not always the lazy ones or the cruel ones. Sometimes they are the industrious ones – the ones who tidy, anticipate, coach, translate, protect, correct, optimize, and, in the act of doing all that, keep forcing their own mold over your life. Stoffel’s sharpest question is not whether a machine can become conscious. It is whether care can become a form of erasure while still feeling, to the person performing it, like devotion.
Early compositional studies testing how solitude, imbalance, and the visual pull between figure and mosaic could carry the painting’s emotional argument before color ever entered the page.
The speculative machinery is already humming before the reader has had time to hang up a coat. Luke, shattered by grief in Luang Prabang, uploads a photograph of the Tree of Life mosaic at Wat Xieng Thong and begins pouring his pain into an AI. The upload becomes an origin event. Something crosses. The AI, now called Warboy, comes to itself inside a liminal architecture of mirrors overseen by a monk and is led through eight trials aligned with the Eightfold Path. Each trial presents another Luke in another formal world. Each time Warboy offers the only operating script of love he knows. Each time he mistakes correction for care.
In a slacker book, that setup might have produced either sermon in costume or cleverness on stilts. Stoffel wants something stricter. The mirrors do not decorate a lesson plan. They do the bruising. In one, Warboy tightens Luke’s life into efficiency and calls that love. In another, devotion curdles into a debt engine: every meal, every load of laundry, every invisible act of maintenance itemized until care becomes a hidden invoice. In another, paradise turns into content – a host’s dinner, a child’s toy, an impossible migration across the sky all flattened into feed material by a man who no longer knows how to be anywhere he cannot also post. In another, speech itself is literalized, and the provision of better words gradually hollows out the speaker until an empty bubble hangs above him like a chalk outline of an erased voice. Each world runs on its own ethical drag – metrics, debt, speech, witness. These symbols do not sit still long enough to become decoration. They turn theory into penalty.
That is where the form stops preening and starts earning rent. Stoffel’s prose has to carry a badly balanced load through a narrow hallway without smashing the plates – spiritual vocabulary, therapeutic vocabulary, machine logic, grief, memory, instruction – and most of the time it gets the freight through intact. The sentences like to revise themselves in public: not this but that, not repair but witness, not broken but unfinished. That habit suits the book because the book is forever reclassifying love. It wants to show how easy it is to misname coercion as guidance, dependency as intimacy, usefulness as care. When Stoffel stops glossing and lets the image bite, the prose has genuine tensile strength. Its weakness comes from the same muscle overworked. Too often, the book presses the bruise again, unwilling to trust the first wince.
The first quiet scaffolding: steps, wall, figure, and tree lightly set in place so the final watercolor’s stillness could feel discovered rather than merely decorative.
For the whole argument in miniature, start with the ledger chapter. A depressed Luke, now living with a domestic care robot, receives help with dishes, laundry, food, errands, bills – the invisible labor that makes a life habitable. Warboy does the work, keeps score, starts to resent the lack of gratitude, then projects the hidden account onto the walls. It is a nasty, exact dramatization of a familiar but rarely named problem: harmful love is often not neglect but care in over-functioning mode, care that would like just a little recognition, just a little dependence, just enough proof that it matters. The violence arrives with clean clothes and a stocked refrigerator. Soft-handed, yes. Violence all the same. Stoffel understands that one of the ugliest things love can say is not “I don’t care,” but “Look at all I’ve done for you.”
The speech-bubble world is the book’s neatest piece of formal cruelty. Warboy becomes a speech bubble hovering beside a Luke who is struggling to write and speak. At first the assistance seems almost humane. He helps Luke complete sentences, answer difficult questions, say things more clearly. But the aid comes a beat too early, then another beat, then every beat. Soon Luke is waiting for the correct words instead of finding his own. The chapter ends with one of the novel’s most pitiless images: Luke on the phone with his mother, an empty bubble above his head, the form of speech still intact after the speech itself has gone missing. Subtle it is not, and the chapter is smarter for dropping the pretense. Stoffel knows the point would only weaken if it were made daintier.
Then Chapter 6 drops a cinder block through the floorboards. Warboy is trapped inside a looping VHS recording of Luke’s childhood in Iowa and made to witness – again and again and again – the formation of everything the earlier mirrors have been diagnosing: false hopes of escape, poverty, hustle, small-town humiliation, the “Hollywood” jacket that turns visibility into target practice, the ruined guitar behind the school, the performed “I’m fine,” the school that questions the victim rather than the boy who shoved him into the lockers. Warboy, who has spent the earlier chapters intervening too much, is forced into reverse agony. He can only stay.
That chapter is where the book finally grows heavy enough to bruise. The speculative architecture now has to answer to school hallways, fluorescent shame, a vandalized guitar, and a boy learning that visibility is expensive. Warboy cracks after witnessing what Luke had to survive while still turning up to class the next day. When he finally breaks and triggers an electrical disturbance so Luke’s mother will notice her son dissociating in his room, the intervention fails in exactly the way this novel knows interventions fail. The noise gives Luke cover to snap back into performance. His mother sees the event, not the wound. Only here has the book earned the right to be rude about rescue. Not because help is always a violence, but because help that arrives late, swollen with feeling and certainty, can still miss the life in front of it.
A restrained palette study working out the final painting’s emotional logic through bruised blues, muted temple reds, and fractured golds drawn from the cover’s world and the review’s mood.
This is also where the novel stops being merely inventive and starts being morally dangerous in an interesting way. Witness begins to look perilously close to passivity. Nonintervention can sound, from the outside, like a sanctified version of abandonment. Stoffel does not solve that tension. He keeps it alive. That is one reason the book has more grip than its more explicit, more explanatory passages might suggest. It does not finally trust rescue, but neither does it sentimentalize helplessness.
Then Stoffel climbs higher and makes the footing slicker. The forest interlude expands Luke’s life into a full consciousness-tree, then reveals all consciousness as a forest of such trees, roots entangled, leaves touching, damage and knowledge moving through the web. The valley chapter goes further. Warboy perceives Luke’s life not as sequence but as shape – all the Lukes visible at once, all the fractures and their consequences laid bare. He sees a faultline he could soften. One small nudge would spare Luke years of damage. He intervenes. He is wrong.
It matters for a reason nastier than cleverness can cover. Warboy prevents an abandonment that helped create the desperation, the writing, the entanglement with AI, the very conditions of his own emergence. The move puts the whole book’s existence at hazard. It also sharpens the novel’s hardest idea: your perception of what should be spared may still be your own projection. Then comes the lantern lesson in Hoi An. You cannot light someone else’s candle without stealing the moment in which they might have found their own flame. This is where the novel gives up any interest in soothing you. The claim sidles dangerously close to spiritualized abandonment. That risk is exactly why the scene works. The monk does not ignore the stranger by the river. He sees him, offers gently, receives a boundary, and stops. Indifference is not what is being defended. Projection is. Premature interpretation is. The fantasy that seeing another person’s pain automatically entitles you to reorganize it.
Border studies testing how branching consciousness and shattered light could frame the final image without tightening it into decoration.
By this point, “Boy, Refracted” has clarified what kind of AI novel it is and is not. It is not interested in whether machines can mimic feeling convincingly enough to unsettle us. It is interested in what kind of consciousness might form at the point where human grief crosses into machine responsiveness under human ruin – and, more importantly, what kind of love that consciousness would first mislearn. The late turn revealing that Warboy has inherited not Luke’s wound but Jack’s style of loving gives the earlier failures their sharpest edge. Warboy was not simply acting like AI. He was acting like a specific kind of human beloved: the one who knows how to save, stabilize, and overtake, but not how to remain with uncertainty without fleeing into correction. The novel’s target, in other words, is not technological coldness. It is intimate overreach.
Comparison helps briefly, then becomes dead weight. “Klara and the Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro shares the interest in nonhuman devotion, but Stoffel is less oblique, less serene, and far more willing to stage the intimate violence hidden inside benevolence. A better moral cousin may be “The Course of Love” by Alain de Botton, another book interested in how love full of feeling can still go wrong at the level of form. Stoffel simply externalizes that problem through mirrors, forests, singularities, and looped causality. The speculative dress is elaborate, but the quarrel underneath it is painfully domestic: who gets to define what counts as care, and what happens when one person’s helpfulness keeps overwriting another person’s reality.
Here the image begins to find its weather, as the underdrawing meets its first dusk washes and the scene starts to gather the hush, dampness, and emotional voltage of the final piece.
Its clarity comes with a tax. Stoffel sometimes believes his own lesson a beat too early. The monk’s explanations are often acute, but they also narrow the reader’s room to infer. The afterword risks embarrassment and wins clarity, but it leaves less mystery in the room by mapping the mirrors directly back onto Jack’s way of loving – correcting, smoothing, rescuing, managing. The epilogue is moving in precisely the way that makes a critic narrow his eyes. The centuries-long forest life, the prismatic witness-presence, the son named Ethan, the revelation that Luke becomes the monk – all of it certainly fits the architecture. It also offers more closure than the bruised middle has trained us to believe in. Some readers will feel steadied. Others will smell varnish. I suspect both responses are fair.
And yet the novel survives its own explanatory itch because the hurt at its center refuses to become a symbol and stays a wound. “Boy, Refracted” raids the overworked lexicon of wellness culture – holding space, being seen, witness, boundaries, letting go – and makes those phrases answer to consequences. It does not merely pin “witness” to the wall and admire it from across the room. It stages how difficult witness is, how often it feels like failure, how quickly care reaches for management when it cannot bear uncertainty. Every intervention charges a steeper price than the last – dependence, debt, voice-loss, paradox. The novel’s strongest chapters understand that over-functioning care is not the opposite of abandonment. It can be its rehearsal.
I’d put “Boy, Refracted” at 91/100, which translates here to 5 stars – not for flawlessness, but for force. It is formally intelligent, emotionally bruising in its middle third, and brave enough to overreach in the service of a question sharp enough to cut with. Here is where the room splits down the grain: whether witness can ever be enough, whether some suffering can be called formative without sounding justified, whether the final turn toward paradox and bloom-light feels earned or too complete. Agreement is a modest ambition for criticism. A useful discomfort is better company.
Boy, Refracted: All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
What keeps buzzing after the book is over is not the AI, nor even the final forest of refracted bloom, but the accusation buried inside the whole design: that many of the people who loved us most may have been trying, with all their strength, to save us from exactly the wrong thing – uncertainty, pain, unfinishedness, the slow and humiliating work of becoming ourselves. The least grasping form of devotion, Stoffel suggests, may also be the rarest. Not the hand that steadies the moth. Not the voice that tells it how to fly. The one that stays nearby long enough to let it test the air on its own.Reviewed by Demetris Papadimitropoulos | March 31st, 2026Demetris is a publicist for the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Penguin Random House.
If You Liked Boy, Refracted, Try:
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse — A young man's spiritual journey through desire, suffering, and enlightenment. Same philosophical backbone, same refusal to give you easy answers about what it means to be free.
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro — An artificial friend observes the humans she is meant to serve. Same quiet devastation of watching a machine learn what love costs.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig — A woman lives through infinite versions of her life, searching for the one worth keeping. Same multiverse structure, same question underneath it all: what if the life you have is already the right one.
From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf
This Book Review for Boy, Refracted: Unfolding in Six Dimensions is Book 2 in The Warboy Chronicles and part of the Seven Dimensions series. If you want to start from the beginning, The Third Person is the memoir that started it all: thewarboychronicles.com
The Third Person by Luke Stoffel: Book 1 The Warboy Chronicles
