Maggie Estep

• Name — Maggie Estep • Birth Name — Margaret Ann Estep • Born — 20 March 1963 • Birthplace — Summit, New Jersey, U.S. • Died — 12 February 2014 • Place of death — Albany, New York, U.S. • Occupation — * Writer • poet • spoken word artist • Website — www.maggieestep.com

Margaret Ann Estep was born in 1963 in Summit, New Jersey. As a poet, she emerged in the early 1990s when grunge was the height of fashion and her "direct, aggressive and uncompromisingly modern" poetry was highly accessible. Estep appeared on Lollapalooza's third stage in 1994, and featured on MTV's Spoken Word Unplugged, PBS's The United States of Poetry, and on Season 3 of HBO's Def Poetry. Her video for her spoken word track "Hey Baby" received moderate rotation on MTV and was highlighted on MTV's Beavis & Butt-head. She also contributed vocals to two songs on Recoil's 1997 album Unsound Methods. In 2003 she wrote sleevenotes for the Talking Heads box set Once in a Lifetime. Estep went on to write many novels, including Diary of an Emotional Idiot, the Ruby Murphy mystery trilogy, Gargantuan, Hex and Flamethrower, and Alice Fantastic. Hex was named New York Times Notable Book for 2003. She had, for several years, been at work on The Angelmakers, a novel about 19th Century female gangsters and the founding of animal rights.

Estep suffered a heart attack on February 10, 2014, at her home in Hudson, New York, and died from complications two days later in an Albany hospital, aged 50. She was survived by her mother and three half-siblings.