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]
In On Freedom (2021), Nelson returns to criticism, responding to the American right's claim to the concept of "freedom," while the left has turned increasingly towards “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.”[26] Through the lenses of art, drugs, sex, and climate, Nelson makes a case for the liberal claim to freedom.
Nelson's collections of poetry include Something Bright, Then Holes (2007), The Latest Winter (2003), and Shiner (2001).
Nick Flynn is an American writer, playwright, and poet.
Catherine Barnett is an American poet and educator. She is the author of Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space ; Human Hours, winner of the Believer Book Award; The Game of Boxes, winner of the James Laughlin Award; and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award. Her honors include an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She has published widely in journals and magazines including The American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Harper's, The Nation, Pleiades, Poetry, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Washington Post. Her poetry was featured in The Best American Poetry 2016, edited by Edward Hirsch. Barnett teaches in the graduate and undergraduate writing programs at New York University. She has also taught in the MFA Program at Hunter College, Princeton University, The New School, and Barnard College. She also works as an independent editor. She received her B.A. from Princeton University and an M.F.A. from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.,
Mark Doty is an American poet and memoirist best known for his work My Alexandria. He was the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.
Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.
Anthony Dey Hoagland was an American poet. His poetry collection, What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other honors included two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His poems and criticism have appeared in such publications as Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, AGNI, Threepenny Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, Southern Indiana Review, American Poetry Review and Harvard Review.
Linda Alouise Gregg was an American poet.
Carl Phillips is an American writer and poet. He is a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2023, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020.
Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published five collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015.
Ander Monson is an American novelist, poet, and nonfiction writer.
Elizabeth Alexander is an American poet, writer, and literary scholar who has served as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation since 2018.
Terese Svoboda is an American poet, novelist, memoirist, short story writer, librettist, translator, biographer, critic and videomaker.
Monica Youngna Youn is an American poet and lawyer.
Eula Biss is an American non-fiction writer who is the author of four books.
Carmen Giménez, formerly known as Carmen Giménez Smith, is an American poet, writer, and editor.
Maria Saskia Hamilton was an American poet, editor, and professor and university administrator at Barnard College. She published five collections of poetry, the final of which, All Souls, was posthumously published in September 2023. Her academic focus was largely on the American poet Robert Lowell; she edited several collections of the writings and personal correspondence of Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Elizabeth Bishop. Additionally, she served as the director of literary programs at the Lannan Foundation, as the Vice Provost for Academic Programs and Curriculum at Barnard College, and as an editor at The Paris Review and Literary Imagination.
Melissa Febos is an American writer and professor. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Whip Smart (2010) and the essay collections Abandon Me (2017) and Girlhood (2021).
Bluets is a book by American author Maggie Nelson, published by Wave Books in 2009. The work hybridizes several prose and poetry styles as it documents Nelson's multifaceted experience with the color blue, and is often referred to as lyric essay or prose poetry. It was written between 2003 and 2006. The book is a philosophical and personal meditation on the color blue, lost love, grief and existential solitude. The book is full of references to other writers, philosophers and artists. The title refers to the painting Bluets by the artist Joan Mitchell.
Layli Long Soldier is an Oglala Lakota poet, writer, feminist, artist, and activist.
Diane Seuss is an American poet and educator. Her book frank: sonnets won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2022.
The Argonauts is a book by poet and critic Maggie Nelson, published in 2015. It mixes philosophical theory with memoir. The book discusses her romantic relationship with the transgender artist Harry Dodge leading to her pregnancy as well as topics ranging from the death of a parent, transgender embodiment, academia, familial relationships, and the limitations of language. Nelson also explores and criticizes ideas from several philosophers including Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The title is a reference to Roland Barthes' idea that to love someone is similar to an Argonaut who constantly replaces parts of their ship without the ship changing names. The book won a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism for books published in 2015.
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.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
