Biography
Maggie Estep was a spoken-word poet and novelist and born in 1963 in New Jersey. She is best known for popularizing slam poetry in the 1990s with edgy, political and gender-themed performances. At Manhattan’s Nuyorican Poets Café, the center of the poetry slam movement, audiences applauded her for poems like “The Stupid Jerk I’m Obsessed With” and “Hey Baby”—which was later set to punk-inflected music and made her an MTV star. Estep, who worked briefly as a go-go dancer when she first moved to Manhattan, became addicted to heroin and started to write fiction in rehab. Later she studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University Colorado, where William Burroughs was a mentor. She received a bachelor’s degree in literature from the State University of New York. Estep published several novels and released two spoken word albums: No More Mr. Nice Girl and Love is a Dog From Hell.