Nelson grew up in the Bay Area. She studied 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 of St. Mark's Church, and studied informally with writer Eileen Myles. In 2004 she obtained a Ph.D. in English Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she studied with Wayne Koestenbaum and Eve Sedgewick, among others. Nelson is the author of several critically acclaimed 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 of Arts, and CalArts. Currently she is a Professor of English at USC. Nelson is married to the artist Harry Dodge. They live with their family in Los Angeles.
Books
The Argonauts won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and was a New York Times best-seller. It is a work of "autotheory", offering thinking about desire, identity, family-making, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. Nelson has described it as reflecting 20 years of living with and learning from feminist and queer theory. 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 was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. 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. Bluets 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. It quickly became a cult classic, and was named by Bookforum as one of the 10 best books of the past 20 years. Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions 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. In 2008 the book was awarded the Susanne M. Glasscock Award for Interdisciplinary Scholarship. The Red Parts and Jane: A Murder both contend with the murder of Nelson's aunt Jane near Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1969. 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. It was a finalist for the PEN / Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. 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. Nelson's collections of poetry include Something Bright, Then Holes, The Latest Winter, and Shiner.
Themes
Nelson's work has included writing on art, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory and philosophy.
