Maggie Estep

Maggie Estep was a novelist and spoken-word poet who helped popularize so-called slam poetry on MTV, HBO and PBS in the 1990s,

The daughter of horse trainers, she was bnorn in New Jersey and grew up in Canada, France, Colorado and Georgia. According to news reports, she moved to New York City in her late teens and began writing while in a rehabilitation clinic for a drug addiction.

A writer of both fiction and poetry, Estep read her work at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, one of the early venues for the slam poetry movement, described in the New York Times as a melding of "live reading, a rap battle and stand-up comedy, as performers try to win over the audience with wit, braggadocio and, occasionally, nuance."

She eventually performed her work at the music festivals Lollapalooza and Woodstock ’94, and on television on MTV’s Unplugged and Russell Simmons’s Def Poetry Jam on HBO.

In addition, she recorded two spoken-word albums accompanied by music and published several novels.

Estep died February 12, 2014, in Albany, New York. She was 50.