When Maggie Nelson’s parents divorced and her father suddenly died a few years later, she processed it by writing. She later earned a PhD in New York and self-published her first books there, surrounded by performance, dance, and art.
Her book Jane: A Murder would become her first novel. It changed her as a writer, she explains: “I’d written so many lyric poems, but I’d never tried to tell a story or hold a whole book together.” Personally, this book also taught Nelson “being brave with pursuing a topic, getting over what my family might think. Claiming my own curiosity about the subject.”
“Curiosity is a very sacred thing and it’s very easy to have it go dark,” she explains. She goes on to say that she will always remain a student of her own curiosity.
In the video, Maggie Nelson reads from the books Jane: A Murder (2005) and Bluets (2009), a murder mystery and a meditation on the color blue. “My books as you say, have different themes, a book about the color blue, a book about cruelty and art, books about the courtroom drama, a book about making queer family, to me, because I’m just me, they seem fairly obsessively rotating around similar things.” She explains this trail of ideas further: “There’s usually a question or a subject that has come up during the writing of one book, that will then lead to the next.”
Maggie Nelson (born March 12, 1973) is an American writer whose work blurs genres, mixing poetry, memoir, critical theory, art criticism, and autobiography. Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she earned a B.A. at Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in English literature from the City University of New York. Among her best-known books are Bluets (2009), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011), and The Argonauts (2015), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. She teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles with her partner, Harry Dodge, and their children.
Maggie Nelson was interviewed by Nanna Rebekka in August 2025 at The Lab Copenhagen.
Producer: Nanna Rebekka
Editor: Astrid Agnes Hald
Camera: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025
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