Maggie Estep was born in Summit, New Jersey on March 20, 1963. She dropped out of high school in her late teens and moved to Manhattan. She worked briefly as a go-go dancer, joined the punk scene and became addicted to heroin. She took up fiction writing at a drug rehabilitation clinic in the mid-1980s. She attended the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado and received a B.A. in literature from the State University of New York. She was a novelist and spoken-word poet who helped popularize slam poetry on MTV, HBO and PBS in the 1990s. She wrote several books during her lifetime including Diary of an Emotional Idiot, Love Dance of the Mechanical Animals, Hex, and… Alice Fantastic. She also published two spoken-word albums with rock accompaniment, No More Mr. Nice Girl and Love Is a Dog from Hell. She died on February 12, 2014 after suffering a massive heart attack two days before at the age of 50.