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Stephen Elliott (born December 3, 1971) is an American author and activist living in San Francisco who has written and published seven books. He is also the founder of the political action committee LitPAC, which holds readings by authors to raise money for progressive candidates.

Elliott grew up in Chicago. In his adolescence he was made a ward of the court and placed in several group homes. He attended the University of Illinois and went on to receive his master's degree from Northwestern University. He was the Marsh McCall lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University. In 2001 he was awarded the Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, given to emerging writers in fiction and poetry.

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 (Picador, Oct 2004, ISBN 0312424159). His novel Happy Baby was edited by Dave Eggers and co-published by McSweeney's and MacAdam/Cage and 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 (ISBN 1573442550), a collection of S&M erotica, sometimes referred to as a sexual memoir, was published by Cleis Press in 2006.

In April 2007, he published an essay about his experiment of not using the Internet for one month, writing: "I could feel my attention span lengthening. I would think about problems until I figured them out."

In 2008, Elliott started The Rumpus, an online cultural commentary site.

His most recent book is a "true-crime memoir" called "The Adderall Diaries" (Graywolf, September 2009, ISBN 1555975380).

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Stephen Elliott", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0