Maggie Nelson (born 1973) is an American writer. She is generally described as a genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, 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.