Maggie Nelson (born 1973) is an American writer. She has been described as a genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory, philosophy, scholarship, and poetry. Nelson has been the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a 2011 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction. Other honors include the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and a 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant.
Nelson was born in 1973, the second daughter of Bruce and Barbara Nelson. She grew up in Marin County, California. Her parents divorced when she was eight, and then, in 1984, Nelson's father died of a heart attack. She moved to Connecticut in 1990 to study English at Wesleyan University where she was taught by Annie Dillard. After college, she lived in New York City where she trained as a dancer, worked at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, and studied informally with writer Eileen Myles. In 1998, she enrolled in a graduate program, obtaining a Ph.D. in English literature in 2004 at the CUNY Graduate Center. At CUNY, Nelson studied with Wayne Koestenbaum and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick , among others. She left New York in 2005 to take up a teaching job at the California Institute of the Arts.
Nelson is the author of several books of nonfiction and poetry. She also writes frequently on art, including essays on artists Sarah Lucas, Matthew Barney, Carolee Schneemann, A. L. Steiner, Kara Walker, and Rachel Harrison. Nelson has taught about writing, critical theory, art, aesthetics, and literature, at the graduate writing program of The New School, Wesleyan University, Pratt Institute, and California Institute of the Arts. As of 2021, she was a professor of English at the University of Southern California.
