Melanie Neilson

Melanie Neilson was born in Humboldt, Tennessee, and raised in San Diego, California. She earned a BA from the University of California, San Diego, where she studied visual arts and literature. At Hunter College, Neilson studied combined media and art history and wrote her MFA thesis on Mary Shelley. With the support of a graduate travel scholarship, she visited megalithic sites in Scotland, England, and the Orkney Islands. In the 1980s, Neilson became involved in the experimental poetry scene in New York as a poet, an editor, and a reading series coordinator. Between 1989 and 2000, she and fellow poet Jessica Grim published Big Allis magazine, a forum for experimental writing by emerging and established poets. 

Neilson’s poems are known for their dark humor, musicality, and strangeness, and for playfully exploring the workings of identity and language with screwball disjunction. "On a good day, incognito explodes alphabetically into plays of sound, into real abstraction," Neilson has written of her work. "Incitements and instigations are placed in the linguistic scene of the poem, on stages of form."

Neilson’s poetry collections and chapbooks include Civil Noir (1991), Natural Facts (1996), Prop and Guide (1991), and Reader Souvenir (2018). Her work has been included in the anthologies Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry, edited by David Trinidad (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Out of Everywhere, Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK, edited by Maggie O'Sullivan (Reality Street, 1996). In 2020, she completed a book-length poem cowritten with Jessica Grim titled The Autobiography of Jean Foos.

Neilson is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and has received project grants from the Brooklyn Arts Council, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and Artists Space. She lives in Queens, New York.