Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson (born 1973) is an American writer. She is the author of five books of nonfiction, including The Argonauts (2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011), Bluets (2009), The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial, (first published in 2007, reprinted in 2016), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007, winner of the Susanne M. Glassock Award in Interdisciplinary Scholarship).
Her books of poetry include Something Bright, Then Holes (2007), Jane: A Murder (2005, finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir), The Latest Winter (2003), and Shiner (2001). The Argonauts 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.
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. She has been the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and an Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant. She is generally described as a genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, scholarship, and poetry.

Nelson has taught at the Graduate Writing Program of the New School, Wesleyan University, and the School of Art and Design at Pratt Institute; she currently directs the CalArts MFA writing program and lives in Los Angeles.

Nelson's work has included writing on art, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory and philosophy.

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.

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

• MFA Program News and Events
• National Endowment of the Arts 2011 Poetry Fellows
• "100 Notable Books of 2015". The New York Times. 2015-11-27. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2016-03-09. 
• Alexandra Alter (March 17, 2016). "'The Sellout' Wins National Book Critics Circle's Fiction Award". New York Times. Retrieved March 18, 2016.