In '73 in San Francisco, and grew up
in the Bay Area attending high school in the Haight-Ashbury.
When she was in eighth grade she won a poetry contest sponsored
by the rock band, The Cure.
[LAUGHTER]
Encouraged by this early success,
she has been writing poetry ever since.
She graduated from Wesleyan in 1994.
Her poems have appeared in Ms., New American Writing, Hanging
Loose, and other publications, as well as in the chapbook
Pacific, published by Orchard Street Press in '95.
A collection with poet Cynthia Nelson titled Not Sisters,
from Soft Skull Press in 1993.
Her manuscript, The Scratch-Scratch Diaries
was recently featured in an Agni Graywolf press publication:
Take Three: New Poet Series.
She lives in New York where she's
worked as an assistant editor for Best American Poetry
as well as working as a waitress, a bartender,
and a modern dancer.
She's currently working on a PhD in English.
Nelson's poems are urban, edgy, and mercurial.
The world is constantly changing shape, she writes.
And her poems are so formally controlled
that they see a-- they seem a stay against change,
yet so shifting and at play that they
seem an embodiment of change.
She writes a spare and energetic short lined
poem filled with the real places and people of her day.
A poem that has many of the virtues of Creeley.
So condensed that the music of the words jumps.
Of her work, Creeley has said, "Maggie Nelson
brings a deft and unflagging wit to her writing.
And her powers of invention never quit.
I love the way all she says keeps moving, insistent, often
abrasive like they say, and always specific."
Can it get any better?
I don't think so.
Please welcome Maggie Nelson.
[APPLAUSE]