On Freedom: Maggie Nelson in Conversation with Baharak Yousefi

Those who are first introduced to Maggie Nelson soon notice her name throughout their literary and social worlds. The award-winning writer, scholar, poet, and critic is one of the most prolific and influential Western thinkers today. As Vulture shared, “Reading Nelson is like watching a prima ballerina deliver the performance of a lifetime: athletic, graceful, and awe-inspiring.” The same goes for her latest work, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, which draws on a vast range of material to explore how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom. Thinking publicly through the knots in our culture—from recent art-world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis—is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company.

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