Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Her nonfiction titles include the New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts (2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011; a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets (2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007; reissued 2016), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007). Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (2007) and Jane: A Murder (2005; finalist for the PEN/ Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir). Her books cover a wide variety of topics, from queer family making, to the history of violence in avant-garde art, to the color blue, to sexual murder, to the women of Abstract Expressionism, and more. She is known for working within many genres or across genres, including poetry, narrative nonfiction, art and cultural criticism, and new forms which combine all of the above. She writes frequently on art, including recent essays on Carolee Schneemann, Matthew Barney, Kara Walker, and Sarah Lucas. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA in Poetry, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, and an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. In 2016 she was awarded a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. She is currently on the faculty of USC and lives in Los Angeles.