Bio
Jessica Max Stein (“Max”) has been a New York-based writer since the early 90s. She teaches writing and literature at the City University of New York (CUNY), and received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Brooklyn College.
Stein’s writing appears regularly in make/shift magazine and on LGBT web clearinghouse The Bilerico Project. A former editor and reporter for the New York Indypendent, Stein received an Independent Press Association Award for her editorial on the bias murder of Sakia Gunn. Stein’s work also garnered an Amy Award for young writers from Poets and Writers magazine.
Stein is best known for her work on Muppeteer Richard Hunt. She is writing a full-length biography of Hunt, entitled The Rainbow Connection: The Life and Times of Richard Hunt.
In 2009 Stein self-published a zine version of The Rainbow Connection, telling Hunt’s story in 90 pages from over a hundred secondary sources. The publication was a runaway success, distributed throughout America and as far away as Australia, Singapore and England. A 15-city cross-country Rainbow Connection tour drew crowds at bookstores, colleges and theaters, including a full house at New York’s Dixon Place.
The Rainbow Connection is Stein’s tenth zine. Previous zines include The Long Walk Back to Myself, a perennial best-seller at Microcosm Publishing; and Body, Language, an Honorable Mention in the 2007 Zine Yearbook. Her non-fiction and poetry have appeared in about a hundred journals and magazines, including the Sun magazine, Thirteenth Moon, Punk Planet and other less celestially-named publications.
Stein divides her time between Brooklyn and upstate New York.
Contact her at richard.hunt.biography at gmail dot com.