Maggie Nelson | |
|---|---|
 Maggie Nelson at theSan Francisco Public Library | |
| Born | 1973 (age 52–53) |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | |
| Genres |
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| Notable awards | MacArthur Fellow |
| Spouse | Harry Dodge |
| Children | 2 |
Maggie Nelson (born 1973) is an American writer. She has been described as agenre-busting writer defying classification, working inautobiography,art criticism,theory,feminism,queerness,sexual violence, the history of theavant-garde,aesthetic theory,philosophy,scholarship, andpoetry. Nelson received a 2016MacArthur Fellowship, and several other major awards in the years before that.
Nelson was born in 1973, the second daughter of Bruce and Barbara Nelson.[1][2] She grew up inMarin County, California. Her parents divorced when she was eight. In 1984, Nelson's father died of a heart attack.[1]
In 1990, Nelson moved to Connecticut to study English atWesleyan University, where she attended classes byAnnie Dillard.[1] After college, she lived inNew York City, where she trained as a dancer, worked at thePoetry Project at St. Mark's Church, and studied informally with writerEileen Myles. She enrolled at theCUNY Graduate Center in 1998 and obtained aPh.D. in English literature in 2004.[1] At CUNY, Nelson studied withWayne Koestenbaum andEve Kosofsky Sedgwick, among others.[1] She left New York in 2005 to take a teaching job at theCalifornia Institute of the Arts.[2]
Nelson is the author of several books of nonfiction and poetry. She also writes frequently on art, including essays on artistsSarah Lucas,[3]Matthew Barney,[4]Carolee Schneemann,[5]A. L. Steiner,[6]Kara Walker,[7] andRachel Harrison.[8]
Nelson has taught about writing, critical theory, art, aesthetics, and literature, at the graduate writing program ofThe New School,Wesleyan University,Pratt Institute, andCalifornia Institute of the Arts. As of 2021[update], she was a professor of English at theUniversity of Southern California.[9]
Nelson is married to the artistHarry Dodge, who is fluidly gendered.[2] They live with their family inLos Angeles.
The Argonauts (2015) won theNational Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism[10] and was aNew York Times best-seller. It is a work ofautotheory, offering thinking about desire, identity, family-making, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language.[11] In it, Nelson documents the changes in her body throughout pregnancy with her son, Iggy, and that of her spouseHarry Dodge's body after commencing testosterone and undergoingchest reconstruction ("top surgery").[2] Nelson has described it as reflecting 20 years of living with and learning from feminist and queer theory.
The Art of Cruelty (2011), a work of cultural, art, and literary criticism, was featured on the front cover of the Sunday Book Review of theNew York Times[12] and was named aNew York Times Notable Book of the Year.[13] It covers a wide range of topics, includingSylvia Plath's poetry,Francis Bacon's paintings, theSaw franchise, andYoko Ono's performance art, and offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.[14]
Bluets (2009) is a book of prose in numbered segments that deals with pain, pleasure, heartbreak, and the consolations of philosophy, all through the lens of the color blue.[15] It quickly became a cult classic, and was named one of the 10 best books of the past 20 years byBookforum.[16]
Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007) is a scholarly book about gender andabstract expressionism from the 1950s through the 1980s. It focuses on the work of painterJoan Mitchell and poetsBarbara Guest,John Ashbery,James Schuyler,Frank O'Hara,Bernadette Mayer,Alice Notley, andEileen Myles.[17] In 2008 it received the Susanne M. Glasscock Award for Interdisciplinary Scholarship.[18]
Jane: A Murder (2005) andThe Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007) contend with the 1969 murder of Nelson's aunt Jane nearAnn Arbor, Michigan.[19]Jane: A Murder explores the incident via a collage of poetry, prose, dream-accounts, and documentary sources, including local and national newspapers, related "true crime" books, and fragments from Jane's diaries. Part elegy, part memoir, detective story, part meditation on sexual violence, and part conversation between the living and the dead,Jane is widely recognized as having expanded the notion of what poetry can do—what kind of stories it can tell, and how it can tell them.[20] It was a finalist for the PEN / Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir.[21]
The Red Parts picks up whereJane left off, recounting the trial of a new suspect in Jane's murder 36 years after the fact. It is a coming-of-age story, a documentary account of a trial, and an interrogation of the American obsession with violence and missing white women and the nature of grief, justice, and empathy.[22]
InOn Freedom (2021), Nelson returned to criticism, responding to the American right's claim to the concept of "freedom," while the left has turned increasingly toward "a discourse about when and how certain transgressions in art should be 'called out' and 'held accountable,' with the twist that now the so-called left is often cast—rightly or wrongly—in the repressive, punitive position".[23] Through the lenses of art, drugs, sex, and climate, Nelson makes a case for the liberal claim to freedom.
Nelson's collections of poetry includeSomething Bright, Then Holes (2007),The Latest Winter (2003), andShiner (2001).
'She found a friendship with her instabilities and turned it immediately into questions that are dazzled, rather than narcotized,' the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, with whom Nelson studied at cuny, told me.
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