[4] After college, she lived in New York City where she trained as a dancer, worked at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, and studied informally with writer Eileen Myles.

She also writes frequently on art, including essays on artists Sarah Lucas,[6] Matthew Barney,[7] Carolee Schneemann,[8] A. L. Steiner,[9] Kara Walker,[10] and Rachel Harrison.

It is a work of autotheory, offering thinking about desire, identity, family-making, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language.

[16] The book covers a wide range of topics, from Sylvia Plath's poetry to Francis Bacon's paintings, from the Saw franchise to Yoko Ono's performance art, and offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.

[17] Bluets (2009) is an unclassifiable book of prose written in numbered segments that deals with pain, pleasure, heartbreak, and the consolations of philosophy, all through the lens of the color blue.

Written in plain, trenchant prose reminiscent of Joan Didion, The Red Parts is a coming of age story, a documentary account of a trial, and a provocative essay interrogating the American obsession with violence and missing white women, and the nature of grief, justice, and empathy.

[25] In On Freedom (2021), Nelson returns to criticism, responding to the American right's claim to the concept of "freedom," while the left has turned increasingly towards “a discourse about when and how certain transgressions in art should be ‘called out’ and ‘held accountable,’ with the twist that now the so-called left is often cast — rightly or wrongly — in the repressive, punitive position.”[26] Through the lenses of art, drugs, sex, and climate, Nelson makes a case for the liberal claim to freedom.