Over the last decade, Maggie Nelson’s writing has become one of the guiding intellectual lights for artists of all disciplines. Her books on aesthetics, gender, violence, and, most recently, freedom, allow for the kind of open, generative quality of thought that suits the artistic temperament. In this way, she has not established herself with a series of spicy opinions or fixed positions, but through a celebration of the endless challenge of uncertainty.

Nelson began her career writing poetry and published three collections while living in New York City in the ’90s and early aughts. These received little attention at the time of publication but have recently been reissued in response to her growing readership. In the mid-2000s Nelson began focusing on variants of nonfiction that could contain her poetic impulses and document patterns of culture more explicitly.