Book Series Guide

Author guide

Maggie Nelson Books in Order

Maggie Nelson is an American poet, essayist, memoirist, and art critic. Her work moves across poetry, lyrical nonfiction, memoir, literary criticism, and hybrid forms. Her books include Jane: A Murder, The Red Parts, Bluets, The Art of Cruelty, The Argonauts, On Freedom, Like Love, Pathemata, and The Slicks. She is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and has received fellowships and honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

poetrylyrical nonfictionmemoirliterary criticismessaysart criticism

Catalog record updated .

Maggie Nelson's Newest Book

Cover of Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth

Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth

memoir · First published 2025

Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth is an experiment in interiority written in the pandemic studio. Something of a companion piece to 2009's Bluets, Pathemata merges a pain diary chronicling a decade of jaw pain with dreams and dailies, eventually blurring the lines between embodied, unconscious, and everyday life. In scrupulously distilled prose, Pathemata offers a tragicomic portrait of a particularly unnerving and isolating moment in recent history, as well as an abiding account of how it feels to inhabit a mortal body in struggle to connect with others. Formally inspired by Hervé Guibert's The Mausoleum of Lovers, and conceptually guided by Gilles Deleuze's notion of artist as symptomologist, Pathemata is yet another urgent innovation from Maggie Nelson in the art of life-writing.

Not sure where to begin?

Start with one of these

Cover of Bluets

Bluets

A concise, accessible introduction to Nelson’s genre-defying lyrical prose.

Cover of The Argonauts

The Argonauts

Her best-known hybrid memoir and a central work on queer family, gender, and language.

Cover of On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint

On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint

A clear entry point into her philosophical and political essays.

Outside the series

Bibliography by category

Nonfiction (6)
  1. The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial

    memoir · 2007

    One day in March 1969, twenty-three-year-old Jane Mixer was on her way home to tell her parents she was getting married. She had arranged for a ride through the campus bulletin board at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she…

  2. Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions

    literary criticism · 2007

    Maggie Nelson provides the first extended consideration of the roles played by women in and around the New York School of poets, from the 1950s to the present, and offers unprecedented analyses of the work of Barbara Guest, Bernadette…

  3. The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

    literary criticism · 2011

    "This is criticism at its best." —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times Writing in the tradition of Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry, Maggie Nelson has emerged as one of our foremost cultural critics with this landmark work about…

  4. The Argonauts

    memoir · 2015

    An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire,…

  5. Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth

    memoir · 2025

    Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth is an experiment in interiority written in the pandemic studio. Something of a companion piece to 2009's Bluets, Pathemata merges a pain diary chronicling a decade of jaw pain with dreams and dailies,…

  6. The Slicks: On Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift

    literary criticism · 2025

Essays and speeches (2)
  1. On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint

    essays · 2021

    An expansive, exhilarating work of criticism by one of the most significant writers of our day So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom…

  2. Like Love: Essays and Conversations

    essays · 2024

    A career-spanning collection of inspiring, revelrous essays about art and artists Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson’s brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances,…

Poetry (5)
  1. Shiner

    poetry · 2001

    In this electrifying and raw debut anthology, Maggie Nelson unpicks the everyday with the quick alchemy and precision of her later modern classics The Argonauts and Bluets. The poems of Shiner experiment with a variety of styles-syllabic…

  2. The Latest Winter

    poetry · 2003

  3. Jane: A Murder

    poetry · 2005

    Jane explores the nature of this haunting incident via a collage of poetry, prose, and documentary sources, including newspapers, related ''true crime'' books such as The Michigan Murders and Killers Among Us, and fragments from Jane's…

  4. Something Bright, Then Holes

    poetry · 2007

    Maggie Nelson's fourth collection of poems combines a wanderer's attention to landscape with a deeply personal exploration of desire, heartbreak, resilience, accident, and flux. Something Bright, Then Holes explores the problem of losing…

  5. Bluets

    lyrical nonfiction · 2009

    "Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color."

Frequently asked questions about Maggie Nelson

Who is Maggie Nelson, and what is she known for?

Maggie Nelson is an American poet, essayist, memoirist, and art critic known for genre-crossing nonfiction that combines personal experience with criticism, philosophy, and theory.

Sources: poetryfoundation.org (opens in a new tab)macfound.org (opens in a new tab)

Where did Maggie Nelson study, and where does she teach?

She graduated from Wesleyan University and earned a Ph.D. in English literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Sources: wesleyan.edu (opens in a new tab)dornsife.usc.edu (opens in a new tab)

How does Maggie Nelson write about queer identity?

Nelson explores queer identity through discussions of gender, sexuality, family-making, parenthood, and language, often blending memoir with critical theory.

Sources: macfound.org (opens in a new tab)theguardian.com (opens in a new tab)

Who influenced Maggie Nelson’s writing?

Her influences include Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Frank O’Hara, and Eileen Myles. Her work also draws substantially on philosophy, feminist theory, and queer theory.

Sources: newsletter.blogs.wesleyan.edu (opens in a new tab)poetryfoundation.org (opens in a new tab)

What major awards and honors has Maggie Nelson received?

Nelson received a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, and her memoir The Argonauts won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She has also received Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships.

Sources: macfound.org (opens in a new tab)dornsife.usc.edu (opens in a new tab)