Novelist │ McSweeney's Contributor │ Youth Voting Advocate

To have authored what The New York Times Book Review has called “the most intelligent and beautiful book ever written about juvenile detention centers, sadomasochism and drugs” is certainly an uncommon distinction.  But, for a writer who spent the better part of his adolescence as a ward of the State of Illinois and has worked variously as a cabdriver, stripper, bartender and marketing executive as well as teaching creative writing at Stanford University, the uncommon is to be expected.
 
Elliott’s recent fiction, which has been described by JT Leroy as “spare, erotic and beautiful,” draws heavily on his own past. Happy Baby, Elliott’s latest novel, is “an autobiographical heartbreaker … concerned with the ways institutional violence shapes its victims…” (The Village Voice).  It is a dark and affecting look at how abuse often becomes associated with affection.
 
“It sounds like burbling cliché to describe a book like this as a tale of miraculous survival, or a fable demonstrating that a literary sensibility can grow even in the stoniest soil. Let’s say instead that Happy Baby is a most impressive little novel, heartbreakingly and bewilderingly alive in a way most bigger books can’t even imagine” (Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com).
 
Garnering significant critical acclaim, Happy Baby was named one of the best books of 2004 by Salon.com, The Village Voice, The Journal News and New York Newsday.  In addition to Happy Baby, Elliott is the author of three other novels (A Life Without Consequences, What It Means To Love You and Jones Inn) and a political reportage/“memoir” chronicling his time on the 2004 presidential campaign trail.  He also edited Politically Inspired, an anthology of political stories by prominent writers. 
 
A native of Chicago, Elliott spent the ages of 13 through 18 in state custody, growing up in juvenile detention facilities, group homes and foster care.  His experience in this gritty and harrowing world colors much of his fiction, compelling the San Francisco Chronicle to comment, “A Life Without Consequences [his second novel] should be required reading in every social service agency in Chicago.  A copy of it belongs in every teenage runaway drop-in center in the country.  Nobody who reads it will ever vote for another initiative to treat juvenile offenders more like adults.”
 
After being shunted through the various institutions run by the Illinois  Department of Child & Family Services, Elliott luckily came into the care of the Jewish Children’s Bureau. Determined to go back to school and get good grades, he graduated and earned a scholarship to the University of Illinois.  After getting his BA, he went on to Northwestern for an MA in Film Studies and eventually became a writer, and in 2001, he was awarded the prestigious Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.  Good fortune and talent have taken Elliott far from his difficult youth in group homes and on the streets of Chicago, but he is still outspoken about the dire need for reform in our child welfare system.
 
As well as an accomplished fiction writer, Elliott is also an avid observer of the American political process.  And, as someone who waited until the age of 28 to register to vote, he is keenly attuned to the reasons fueling voter apathy.  
 
During the last campaign he covered the presidential primaries for seven months, writing the humorous and insightful political memoir Looking Forward to It: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the American Electoral Process (Picador, 2004).  “The book that Looking Forward to It most consciously resembles is Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail, ’72. Yet Elliott’s book is darker: Thompson was no stranger to viciousness, but he was in some ways a professional connoisseur of it, an observer.  Elliott experiences the crumbling of the polity more personally, and he is remarkably attuned to its level of suggested violence” (Keith Gessen, New York Magazine).
 
After finishing the book he felt an urgency to compel greater numbers of apathetic young people to become voters and organized “Operation Ohio.” Enlisting the help of hot, emerging authors and cult literary figures—including Tobias Wolff, Dave Eggars and Michael Chabon—they hit the  the road in the fall of 2004 touring college campuses in a literarily-inspired voter registration drive or called students in Ohio on election day reminding them to vote.  He intends to engage the “Non-Voting Generation” again in 2008. 

Elliott lives in San Francisco where he works to get authors involved in the political process and organizes The Progressive Reading Series.  He currently teaches creative writing at Stanford University and has served as the Coordinator of the University’s Writer’s Studio. He is a frequent contributor to GQ, Esquire, The Village Voice, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer, McSweeney’s, The Sun and The Huffington Post.

Fiction:

• Happy Baby (MacAdam/Cage, 2004)
• What It Means to Love You: A Novel (MacAdam/Cage, 2002)
• A Life Without Consequences (MacAdam/Cage, 2001)
• Jones Inn (Boneyard Press, 1998)

Nonfiction:

• Looking Forward to It: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the American Electoral Process (Picador, 2004)
• Politically Inspired, Editor, et al. (MacAdam/Cage, 2003) 

Honors & Awards

• Stegner Fellowship, Stanford University (2001-2003) 
• Village Voice’s Favorite Books of the Year: Happy Baby and Looking Forward to It
• New York Newsday’s Favorite Books of 2004: Happy Baby
• Salon’s Top 10 Books of the Year: Happy Baby
• Newcity Chicago’s Top 5 Books of 2004: Happy Baby
• Finalist, New York Public Library Young Lions Award: Happy Baby
• Silver Medal, California Book Award: Happy Baby  

To hear an interview with Stephen Elliott on Los Angeles Public Radio KPCC 89.3 FM, click here.

To hear Stephen Elliott reading from his work on KQED, San Francisco's Public Radio Station, click here.

For more information about Stephen Elliott and his work, please visit www.stephenelliott.com.