Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson is a writer forging a new mode of nonfiction that transcends the divide between the personal and the intellectual and renders pressing issues of our time into portraits of day-to-day lived experience. Nelson’s five book-length works of nonfiction are grounded in experiences and topics with which she is struggling. She invites the reader into her process of thinking through and making sense of her unique concerns with the help of feminist and queer theory, cultural and art criticism, philosophy and psychology. Maggie Nelson received a B.A. (1994) from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. (2004) from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Since 2005, she has been a member of the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, where she currently serves as director of the Creative Writing Program. Nelson has also taught literature and writing at numerous universities and workshops, including the New School, Pratt Institute of Art, and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. Her additional publications include a critical study of poetry and painting entitled Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007) and the poetry collections Something Bright, Then Holes (2007), Jane: A Murder (2005), The Latest Winter (2003), and Shiner (2001).