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Maggie Nelson

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Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson in 2016. Photo by San Francisco Public Library. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Maggie Nelson (born 1973) is an American poet and prosewriter.

Life[]

Overview[]

Nelson is generally described as a genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, scholarship, and poetry.[1][2][3] 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.

Youth and education[]

Nelson studied English at Wesleyan University where she was taught by Annie Dillard.[3]

At the CUNY Graduate Center she wrote a dissertation with the title Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions, published by the University of Iowa Press in 2007. In it, she explores the heteronormative 1950s and 1960s 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.[4]

Career[]

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 a professor of English at the University of Southern California.[5][4][6]

Nelson has written 5 nonfiction books and 4 books of poetry.

Private life[]

Nelson is married to artist Harry Dodge. The couple have a child together. Nelson is the stepmother of Dodge's son from a previous relationship.[7]

Dodge identifies as neither man nor woman. Dodge and Nelson identify as a queer couple.[8]

Writing[]

Jane: A murder (2005) and The Red Parts (2007) both deal with the murder of Nelson’s aunt Jane near Ann Arbor, Michigan , in 1969.[9] Jane: A murder 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.[10] It was a finalist for the PEN / Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir.[11]

The Red Parts: Autobiography of a trial 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.[12]

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.[13] In 2008 the book was awarded the Susanne M. Glasscock Award for Interdisciplinary Scholarship.[14]

Bluets_by_Maggie_Nelson

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

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.[15] It quickly became a cult classic, and was named by Bookforum as one of the 10 best books of the past 20 years.[16]

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,[17] and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.[18] 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.[19]

The Argonauts (2015) won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism[20] and was a New York Times best-seller. It is a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, family-making, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language[21]. Nelson has described it as reflecting 20 years of living with and learning from feminist and queer theory.

Nelson’s collections of poetry include Something Bright, Then Holes (2007), The Latest Winter (2003), and Shiner (2001).

Themes[]

Nelson's work has included writing on art, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory and philosophy.[22] 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 2nd of 2 books she wrote about the 1969 murder of her aunt, Jane Mixer.[23] 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.[1] The book explores themes like the body, gender fluidity, and love through memoir and theory.[1] 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.[24] 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",[3] a phrase she borrows from poet Dana Ward.

Recognition[]

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.[25] 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.[26]

Nelson has been the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship,[27] 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.

Awards and honors[]

Publications[]

Poetry[]

  • Pacific: Poems (chapbook). New York: Orchard Street Press, 1995.
  • Not Sisters (chapbook; with Cynthia Nelson). Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull, 1996.
  • Shiner/ Brookly, NY: Hanging Loose, 2001; London: Zed, 2018.
  • The Latest Winter. Brooklyn, NY: Hanging Loose, 2003; London: Zed, 2016.
  • Something Bright, Then Holes. Brooklyn, NY: Belladonna, 2003; Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull, 2007; London: Zed, 2019.
  • Jane: A murder in poems. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull, 2005; London: Zed, 2019.
  • Bluets (prose poems). Seattle, WA: Wave Books, 2009; London: Jonathan Cape, 2017.

Non-fiction[]

  • The Red Parts: A Memoir. New York: Free Press, 2007.
    • also published as The Red Parts: Autobiography of a trial. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2016; London: Vintage, 2017.
  • Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2007.
  • The Art of Cruelty: A reckoning. NY & London: Norton, 2011.
  • The Argonauts. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2015; London: Melville House, 2016.
Maggie_Nelson

Maggie Nelson


Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat..[32]

See also[]

References[]

Notes[]

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Als, Hilton (2016-04-11). "Maggie Nelson's Many Selves". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/maggie-nelsons-many-selves. 
  2. ↑ Kipnis, Laura (2011-07-14). "Book Review - The Art of Cruelty - By Maggie Nelson" (in en-US). The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/books/review/book-review-the-art-of-cruelty-by-maggie-nelson.html. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Laity, Paul (2016-04-02). "Maggie Nelson interview: 'People write to me to let me know that, in case I missed it, there are only two genders'" (in en-GB). The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/02/books-interview-maggie-nelson-genders. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Hilton, Als (April 18, 2016). "Immediate Family: Maggie Nelson's life in words". The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/maggie-nelsons-many-selves. 
  5. ↑ "Maggie Nelson | Faculty/Staff Directory". https://directory.calarts.edu/directory/maggie-nelson. 
  6. ↑ "Maggie Nelson > Ph.D. in Creative Writing & Literature > USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences" (in en). http://dornsife.usc.edu/cwphd/maggie-nelson/. 
  7. ↑ Laing, Olivia (2015-04-23). "The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson review – 'one of the sharpest thinkers of her generation'" (in en-GB). The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/23/the-argonauts-maggie-nelson-review-harry-dodge-transgender. 
  8. ↑ Feigel, Lara (27 March 2016). "The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson review – a radical approach to genre and gender". https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/27/the-agronauts-maggie-nelson-observer-review. Retrieved 10 April 2019. 
  9. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/02/the-red-parts-autiobiography-of-a-trial-maggie-nelson-review-murder-trial-family-grief
  10. ↑ https://softskull.com/dd-product/jane/
  11. ↑ PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, 2006 Literary Award Winners.
  12. ↑ https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/red-parts
  13. ↑ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1609381092/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i6
  14. ↑ Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship Tenth Annual Prize (2008).
  15. ↑ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1933517409/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0
  16. ↑ Bookforum's 10 Favorites. The Oyster Review. October 2015.
  17. ↑ Laura Kipnis. "Why is Contemporary Art Addicted to Violence?" New York Times Sunday Book Review. July 14, 2011.
  18. ↑ 100 Notable Books of 2011. New York Times Sunday Book Review. November 21, 2011.
  19. ↑ https://www.amazon.com/Art-Cruelty-Reckoning-Maggie-Nelson/dp/0393343146
  20. ↑ National Book Critics Circle Announces Award Winners for Publishing Year 2015. March 17, 2016.
  21. ↑ https://www.amazon.com/Argonauts-Maggie-Nelson/dp/1555977359/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=WG39Y9JTDA0BGZ1BBNNK
  22. ↑ Larson, Thomas (24 January 2011). "Now, Where Was I? : On Maggie Nelson's Bluets". Northwestern University. http://www.triquarterly.org/craft-essays/now-where-was-i-maggie-nelson%E2%80%99s-bluets. 
  23. ↑ Cooke, Rachel (2017-05-21). "Maggie Nelson: 'There is no catharsis… the stories we tell ourselves don't heal us'" (in en-GB). The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/21/argonauts-maggie-nelson-the-red-parts-interview-rachel-cooke. 
  24. ↑ Francis, Gavin (2017-06-08). "Bluets by Maggie Nelson review – heartbreak and sex in 240 turbocharged prose poems" (in en-GB). The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/08/bluets-maggie-nelson-review-heartbreak-sex. 
  25. ↑ "100 Notable Books of 2011" (in en-US). The New York Times. 2011-11-21. ISSN 0362-4331. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/books/review/100-notable-books-of-2011.html?pagewanted=all. 
  26. ↑ "The Oyster Review" (in en). http://review.oysterbooks.com/p/PJcebZ5SVEdYp9kHuwURWj/bookforums-10-favorites. 
  27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 "Maggie Nelson — MacArthur Foundation". https://www.macfound.org/fellows/962/. 
  28. ↑ MFA Program News and Events Template:Webarchive
  29. ↑ National Endowment of the Arts 2011 Poetry Fellows Template:Webarchive
  30. ↑ "100 Notable Books of 2015". The New York Times. 2015-11-27. ISSN 0362-4331. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/books/review/100-notable-books-of-2015.html. 
  31. ↑ Alexandra Alter (March 17, 2016). "'The Sellout' Wins National Book Critics Circle's Fiction Award". New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/business/the-sellout-wins-national-book-critics-circles-fiction-award.html. Retrieved March 18, 2016. 
  32. ↑ Search results = au:Maggie Nelson, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Feb. 11, 2020.

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