Elissa Schappell

Elissa Schappell is an American novelist, short-story writer, editor and essayist. Her first book of fiction, Use Me, a collection of 10 linked short stories, was published in 2000 by William Morrow, and was runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. She is the co-founder of the literary magazine Tin House and Editor-at-Large. She was previously a Senior Editor at The Paris Review. She is a Contributing-editor at Vanity Fair, and was the longtime of author of the "Hot Type" book column. A second book of fiction, Blueprints for Building Better Girls, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2011. It was chosen as a "Best Book of the Year" by The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal. Newsweek/The Daily Beast, and O Magazine. She teaches at schools including Columbia University, NYU, and Queens University. Originally from Delaware, she now lives in Brooklyn with her family.

She graduated from New York University with an MFA in creative writing. Her first career work was for Spy magazine in the 1980s, under founding editor E. Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen. She has contributed articles to magazines such as GQ, Vogue and Spin. Her fiction, interviews and essays have appeared in such places as BOMB, One Story, Nerve, The KGB Bar Reader, The Paris Review: Beat Writers at Work, The Mrs Dalloway Reader, The Bitch in the House, Cooking and Stealing, Bound to Last, Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting (W. W. Norton & Company, 2013). She has written book reviews for The New York Times,Bookforum, and the London Daily Telegraph. She is married to Tin House editor Rob Spillman, with whom she co-founded the magazine.