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.
In 2001-2002, 2004-2005, Margaret Nelson worked as a visiting lecturer in poetry at Wesleyan University, Middletown. In 2002-2005, she was a visiting faculty member at New School University. In 2003-2004, Nelson was a writing instructor at Pratt Institute and the curator at The Poetry Project. In 2005, she moved from New York City to join the faculty at California Institute of the Arts, where she has taught a wide variety of courses in art, literature, writing, theory, and cultural studies for 12 years. She also worked as a director of the creative writing program at California Institute of the Arts. She has been a professor of English at the University of Southern California since 2017.
Her most famous book is The Argonauts published in 2015. It mixes philosophical theory with memoir. The book discusses her romantic relationship with the transgender artist Harry Dodge leading to her pregnancy as well as topics ranging from the death of a parent, transgender embodiment, academia, familial relationships, and the limitations of language. Nelson also explores and criticizes ideas from several philosophers including Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The title is a reference to Roland Barthes’ idea that to love someone is similar to an Argonaut who constantly replaces parts of their ship without the ship changing names. The book won a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism for books published in 2015.
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