Stephen Elliott is an American author, activist, and poker enthusiast currently living in Los Angeles who has written and published seven books and directed two films.
He is the founder and former editor-in-chief of the online literary magazine The Rumpus. In December 2014, he became senior editor at Epic Magazine.
Elliott went on the campaign trail and wrote a book about the 2004 U.S. presidential race, Looking Forward To It: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About It and Love the American Electoral Process. His novel Happy Baby, edited by Dave Eggers and co-published by McSweeney's and MacAdam/Cage, was released in February 2004. The paperback of Happy Baby was published by Picador in January 2005. His book My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up (final edits done at MacDowell while in residence) is a collection of S&M erotica, sometimes referred to as a sexual memoir, published by Cleis Press in 2006. In 2009, he published a true-crime memoir about the Hans Reiser murder trial called The Adderall Diaries, which was adapted into the 2015 film of the same name, in which James Franco played Elliott.
At MacDowell, he completed two essays and several poems.
