Maggie Nelson (Ph.D., the Graduate Center of the City University of New York) is most recently the author of two works of nonfiction: an autobiographical book about her family, criminal justice, and media spectacle titled The Red Parts: A Memoir (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2007), and a critical study about poetry and painting titled Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007). She is also the author of several books of poetry, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007), Jane: A Murder, (Soft Skull, 2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir), The Latest Winter (Hanging Loose Press, 2003), and Shiner (Hanging Loose, 2001; finalist, the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award). Before joining the faculty of CalArts in 2005, she taught literature and writing at the Graduate Writing Program of the New School, Pratt Institute of Art, and Wesleyan University, and also ran a reading series at the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church in New York City. She is a recipient of a 2007 Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and her principal research interests include the relationship between verbal and visual/performing arts, feminist and queer thought, histories of avant-garde movements, the relations between ethics and aesthetics, and representations of violence in art and media. Works-in-progress include Bluets, a book about the color blue written in numbered propositions, and an experimental work of art criticism titled The Art of Cruelty.