American writer Maggie Nelson was BOTD in 1973. Born in San Francisco, she studied at Wesleyan University and City University of New York, becoming a disciple of queer studies academics Eileen Myles and Eve Sedgwick. In 2005, she moved to California to take up a teaching position at the California Institute of the Arts. She published her first collection of poetry, Shiner, in 2001, followed by Jane: A Murder, a poetic reconstruction of the murder of her aunt, and Bluets, a book of prose essay fragments thematically linked by the colour blue. She is best known for her 2015 memoir The Argonauts, a dense and experimental work of auto-fiction focusing on her relationship with the gender-fluid artist Harry Dodge and the birth of their son Iggy, set against the political backdrop of anti-gay marriage initiatives in California. Praised for its blending and collision of narrative genres, it won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2016, Nelson was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. Her latest work On Freedom – Four Songs of Care and Constraint was published in 2021. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches at the University of Southern California.