With Regret: Maggie Estep, 1963-2014

We're shocked and saddened to hear from Bookforum, by way of the East Village blog EV Grieve, that novelist, performer, and poet Maggie Estep has died of a heart attack at the age of 50. "In the early ’90s, Estep was a vital presence in the East Village spoken-word scene. She appeared regularly on MTV and toured with the Lallapalooza festival in 1994. She has written seven novels, including Diary of an Emotional Idiot (1997) and, more recently, the horsetrack noirs Hex (2003) and Flamethrower (2010)."

According to her blog, Estep had been in Hudson, NY, working on a novel called The Angelmakers--"the female gangster book I’ve written seven times and not yet gotten right." "I once nearly had a fist fight with Martin Scorcese in Rome over his (shocking to me) amalgamation of three female gangster characters into one for the movie adaptation of Gangs of New York." Estep studied with Allen Ginsberg at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, and was a vibrant presence in New York City for many years. Our hearts go out to her friends and family.