Elissa Bassist is an award-deserving author, humor writer, teacher, speaker, and editor of the “Funny Women” column on The Rumpus.
As a founding contributor to The Rumpus, she’s written cultural, feminist, and personal criticism since the website launched in 2009. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Marie Claire, Mother Jones, Creative Nonfiction, The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, LATimes.com, EW.com, GMA.com, ELLE.com, The Cut, Jezebel, Longreads, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Paris Review Daily, Insider, Lilith Magazine, and more including the bestselling anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, edited by Roxane Gay.
Formerly, she produced and co-hosted Literary Death Match in San Francisco and was the editor of various impressive books and has since gone on to be a barista.
Currently, she teaches humor writing at The New School, 92NY, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and elsewhere.
Hysterical, published by Hachette, is her first book and a semi-finalist for the 23rd Thurber Prize for American Humor. Her second book, a comedy writing craft book based on her teaching, is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing.
She lives in Brooklyn and is probably her therapist’s favorite.
