Maggie Nelson is back with another wide-ranging and brilliant essay collection, and she’s returning to the City Arts stage. Her newest collection, Like Love, explores queer love and friendship, sex symbols like Prince, and how time alters desire.
Maggie Nelson is a rare academic writer whose fans include casual readers as well as professors. With her best-selling memoir The Argonauts, Nelson became a star of the literary world, winning a National Book Critics Circle Award. During her career Nelson has published nine books of poetry, memoir, and essays, and has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has pioneered hybrid genres and accessible scholarship, frequently describing her interest in poet Eileen Myles’ idea of “vernacular scholarship,” adding, “I need to talk back, or talk with, theorists and philosophers in ordinary language, to dramatize how much their ideas matter to me in my everyday life.” Nelson’s forthcoming collection of essays and conversations, Like Love, cements her as a key contemporary thinker, exploring queer love and friendship, sex symbols like Prince, and how time alters desire.
Frances Richard is the author of Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics, and co-author, with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi, of Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates”; she is the editor of I Stand in My Place With My Own Day Here: Site-Specific Art at The New School, and Joan Jonas is on our mind, a volume of essays on the artist. Her books of poems include Anarch., The Phonemes, and See Through. She has been a member of the editorial teams at Fence and Cabinet, and is senior editor at Places journal. She lives in Oakland.
A limited number of tickets include a copy of Like Love.
Photo by Harry Dodge