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Antonya Nelson (born January 6, 1961) is an American short story writer, novelist, and creative writing professor known for her psychological explorations of daily life. She wrote the novels Nobody’s Girl (1999), Living to Tell (2001), Bound (2011), and, most recently, published her collection of short stories Funny Once (2014). Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Redbook, Esquire and many more. She was included in The New Yorker's 1999 list as one of the “twenty young fiction writers for the new millennium”.
Both of her parents were professors of literature at Wichita State University. Her mother also writes fiction. They were activists and friends with notable writers such as Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg wrote poems set in their hometown of Wichita, Kansas. According to Nelson in an interview with Missouri Review, the girl in "Wichita Vortex Sutra" was written partly inspired by Nelson herself.
She has four siblings, three brothers and a sister, and is the oldest among them. She is the only writer and professor among them. Two of her siblings studied to become psychologists. Initially, Antonya Nelson felt called to become a writer as it was encouraged by her parents, and because she is skilled in reading and writing.
In 1983, Nelson graduated from the University of Kansas with her BA in English Literature and a minor in Art History. She received her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing where she studied with accomplished writers and began focusing on her personal career at the University of Arizona in 1986.
In her early twenties, she won the Mademoiselle young writers' contest and had her story published. In an interview with Atlantic Unbound, she described this moment as a "breakthrough" for her as a writer.
She had a literary agent after graduate school after being referred to one by one of her professors at the University of Arizona. Later, another writer and friend, David Foster Wallace, referred his own literary agent to Nelson and she has been working together with that agent since. She became a faculty member in 1994 at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina, and still holds that position currently.
In 2002, Antonya Nelson left New Mexico State University and became a professor and joined the faculty as a creative writing professor at the University of Houston in Houston, Texas. She maintains this position today.
Between the years 2007 and 2014 she was a Writer at Large for Texas Monthly.
Nelson conducts writing workshops for her students at the University of Houston. Her mentorship and guidance helps influence many young writers develop their own creative voices, but also inspires Antonya Nelson herself.
Nelson's short stories have appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, Quarterly West, Redbook, Ploughshares, Author Details. Pshares.org. Retrieved on 2012-05-18. Harper's, Ball peen, By Antonya Nelson (Harper's Magazine). Harpers.org. Retrieved on 2012-05-18. and other magazines. They have been anthologized in and Best American Short Stories.
Her published works of fiction range from short stories to novels, shifting between the two styles as her interests require. Her debut collection of short stories, The Expendibles (1990), received the Flannery O’Connor Award. It was also chosen by judge Raymond Carver as the first-prize winner in American Short Fiction in 1988.
In 1999, Nelson & her husband guest-edited American Short Fiction’s magazine together.
Her short story " Chapter Two" was published in The New Yorker's March 26, 2012 publication. This short story appeared in her finalized short story collection “ Funny Once: Stories” that came out in 2014.
Several of her novels have been New York Times Book Review Notable Books: In the Land of Men (1992), Talking in Bed (1996), Nobody's Girl: A Novel (1998), Living to Tell: A Novel (2000), and Female Trouble (2002).
For a 1999 issue on The Future of American Fiction, The New Yorker magazine selected Nelson as one of "the twenty best young fiction writers in America today".
Nelson wrote her novel, Nobody’s Girl (1999), with the intention of transforming typical endings to genre novels like romance or mystery into something different. She incorporates both plots into her novel and defies stereotypes. The novel was originally called Sadness, but as the story expanded she changed the name.
Living to Tell (2001) is a novel by Nelson that takes place in Wichita, Kansas, where she grew up. The story takes place in a house that is inspired by Nelson’s childhood home.
Her 2002 collection of short stories, Female Trouble, was written over the course of eight years.
Her novel Bound was published in 2010. It was inspired by the Dennis Rader who terrorized her hometown. Bound was one that she felt would be a novel. it is a flashback-style novel, also known as analepsis. The BTK showed up and disappeared in her hometown while she was an adolescent. Nelson wanted to write a story including all the details of the murderer’s life and how they intertwined with her own. One example she mentions in an interview is how the BTK attended one of her mother’s colleague’s classes. The novel itself blends psychological insight with narrative momentum and was widely reviewed for its look at marriage, memory, and identity.
In 2016, she taught a fiction workshop for the Aspen Summer Words Conference.
Nelson writes from emotional standpoints on close relationships of all kinds, her early stories focusing on family dynamics. Primum Non Nocere, for example, is about a young girl and her mother who is a psychotherapist. For inspiration for novels, she has talked about how she studies people and considers why each person acts the way that they do.
She feels as though it is important to pull inspiration from her personal life for details such as characters, and settings, but doesn’t like to be autobiographical as it limits her writing process. She says if a final work became too close to reality, it would “stop her from being incapable of writing something.”
She has stated that for her writing process, a book is finished only if Nelson is no longer interested in expanding on the psychology of her characters. Only then will her books appear published and in stores.
In an interview conducted by Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature “Writers On the Fly”, she is asked if her short stories are entirely fiction or partly autobiographical. She replies: “in a way that dreams are real to the dreamer, the fiction is real to me”.
Nelson describes her writing and editing process as a coexistence of processes. She looks at it as something to be entertained by, something that she likes to experience by reading out loud. She prefers to write in private, waking up in the middle of the night to do so or leaving the house when she has an idea.
While teaching, she takes notes and works on drafts of short stories and typically comes out with one or two in the fall or winter months. If working on a novel, Nelson takes the summer break to work on those as they declare more time.
She lives and separates her time between three different states: Telluride, Colorado; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and Houston, Texas. She spends most of her time writing in the summer in Colorado, where she has spent summers since she was young.
She and her husband have become owners of three blocks of the town of Telluride, CO.
| First husband | 2014 | |||
| Primum Non Nocere | 2014 | Nelson, Antonya. (November 10, 2014). "Primium Non Nocere". The New Yorker. November 10, 2014 issue. | ||
| Chapter Two | 2012 | Nelson, Antonya. (March 26, 2012). "Chapter Two". The New Yorker. March 26, 2012 issue. | ||
| Literally | 2012 | |||
| Shauntrelle | 2007 |
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