Maggie Nelson

The Argonauts is about Nelson falling in love with the artist Harry Dodge, becoming pregnant, and Dodge beginning testosterone, told alongside theory that runs in the margins of the page rather than over the story. Bluets is two hundred and forty numbered fragments about the colour blue and a depression. The Red Parts is about the trial of the man accused decades later of killing her aunt. She writes criticism and poetry as well, teaches in Los Angeles, and holds a MacArthur fellowship. The word for what she does is autotheory; she did not coin it, but she is the reason people use it.