Nelson was born in 1973, the second daughter of Bruce and Barbara Nelson.[4][5] She grew up in Marin County, California. Her parents divorced when she was eight, and then, in 1984, Nelson's father died of a heart attack.[4]
Nelson is married to the artist Harry Dodge, who is fluidly gendered.[5] They live with their family in Los Angeles.
Books
The Argonauts (2015) won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism[13] and was a New York Times best-seller. It is a work of autotheory, offering thinking about desire, identity, family-making, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language.[14] In the memoir, Nelson documented the changes in her body throughout pregnancy with her son, Iggy, and that of her husband Harry Dodge's body after commencing testosterone and undergoing chest reconstruction ('top surgery').[5] 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 the New York Times[15] and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.[16] The book covers a wide range of topics, from Sylvia Plath's poetry to Francis Bacon's paintings, from the Saw franchise to Yoko Ono's performance art, and offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.[17]
Bluets (2009) is an unclassifiable book of prose written in numbered segments that deals with pain, pleasure, heartbreak, and the consolations of philosophy, all through the lens of the color blue.[18] It quickly became a cult classic, and was named by Bookforum as one of the 10 best books of the past 20 years.[19]
Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007) is a scholarly book about gender and abstract expressionism from the 1950s through the 1980s. It focuses on the work of painter Joan Mitchell, poets Barbara Guest, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Frank O'Hara, and poets Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, and Eileen Myles.[20] In 2008 the book was awarded the Susanne M. Glasscock Award for Interdisciplinary Scholarship.[21]
The Red Parts (2007) and Jane: A Murder (2005) both contend with the murder of Nelson's aunt Jane near Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1969.[22]Jane: A Murder (2005) explores the nature of this haunting 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 own 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.[23] It was a finalist for the PEN / Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir.[24]
The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007) picks up where Jane left off, offering a prose account of the trial of a new suspect in Jane's murder 36 years after the fact. Written in plain, trenchant prose reminiscent of Joan Didion, The Red Parts is a coming of age story, a documentary account of a trial, and a provocative essay interrogating the American obsession with violence and missing white women, and the nature of grief, justice, and empathy.[25]
Nelson's collections of poetry include Something Bright, Then Holes (2007), The Latest Winter (2003), and Shiner (2001).
On Freedom - Four Songs of Care and Constraint (Graywolf Press, 2021). OCLC1257524101[31]
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1 2 3 4 5 Als, Hilton (18 April 2016). "Immediate Family". The New Yorker. Condé Nast. Retrieved 13 May 2020. '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.
↑ Nelson, Maggie. “No excuses.” In Massimiliano Gioni and Margot Norton eds., Sarah Lucas: au naturel. New York: New Museum, 2018.
↑ Nelson, Maggie. “On Porousness, Perversity, and Pharmocopornographia: Matthew Barney’s OTTO Trilogy.” In Matthew Barney: OTTO Trilogy. New York: Gladstone Gallery, 2016.
↑ Nelson, Maggie. “The Reënchantment of Carolee Schneemann.” The New Yorker. March 15, 2019.
↑ Nelson, Maggie. “Puppies and Babies by A. L. Steiner.” In A.L. Steiner, Puppies & Babies, limited edition zine. Los Angeles: Otherwild.
↑ Nelson, Maggie. “On Kara Walker,” the New School for Social Research, NYC, NY.
↑ Nelson, Maggie. “Eighteen Theses on Rachel Harrison.” In David Joselit and Elisabeth Sussman eds., Rachel Harrison life hack. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2019.
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