Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson (born 1973) is an American writer. She is generally described as a genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, scholarship, and poetry. Her honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a NEA Fellowship in Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, and an Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant.

Life and career
Nelson studied English at Wesleyan University where she was taught by Annie Dillard. At the CUNY Graduate Center she wrote a dissertation with the title Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions, which was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2007. In it, she explores the heteronormative nineteen-fifties and sixties New York Abstract Expressionist painting and poetry and calls attention to independent female artists, like Joan Mitchell, and gay male poets, like James Schuyler and Frank O'Hara. Nelson has taught at the Graduate Writing Program of the New School, Wesleyan University, the School of Art and Design at Pratt Institute, and CalArts; she is currently a Professor of English at USC.

Nelson has written five nonfiction books and four books of poetry. The Argonauts (2015) won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and was a New York Times best-seller. The Art of Cruelty, a work of cultural, art, and literary criticism, was featured on the front cover of the Sunday Book Review of the New York Times and named a NY Times Notable Book of the Year. Her 2009 book Bluets, about pain, pleasure, and the color blue became a cult classic,and was named by Bookforum as one of the 10 best books of the past 20 years.

Nelson has been the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a 2011 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, and a 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant.

Themes
Nelson's work has included writing on art, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory and philosophy. She has addressed a number of autobiographical themes in her work. Her memoir about her family, media spectacle, and sexual violence, titled The Red Parts, is the second of two books she wrote about the 1969 murder of her aunt, Jane Mixer. The Argonauts documents a period in time in which Nelson's partner, Harry Dodge, is taking testosterone and having a double mastectomy, and Nelson is pregnant with their son. The book explores themes like the body, gender fluidity, and love through memoir and theory. Bluets is a meditation on the color blue, but also details Nelson's recovery from a break-up while caring for a friend who had been rendered quadriplegic. Her writing is inspired by other feminist writers including Eileen Myles, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, James Schuyler and Allen Ginsberg. She describes her book The Argonauts as a "a long tribute to the many feminist heroes that I had as teachers, men as well as women" to whom she refers to as "the many gendered mothers of my heart", a phrase she borrows from poet Dana Ward.

Personal life
Nelson is married to the artist Harry Dodge. The couple have a child together. Nelson is the stepmother of Dodge's son from a previous relationship.

Dodge identifies as neither man nor woman. Dodge and Nelson identify as a queer couple.

Awards and honors

 * 2007 Arts Writers grant from Creative Capital and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
 * W.2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry.
 * 2015 New York Times Notable Book, The Argonauts.
 * 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award (Criticism), winner for Argonauts.
 * 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, writer.