Margo Steines

Artist Statement

I write nonfiction about bodies and the brutalities humans inflict upon them. I am obsessed with questions of how and why we endure suffering, how spectacle alters the experience of pain, how humans engage with animality, and how community coheres around tests of mettle. I work in a hybrid genre of memoir, essay, cultural criticism, and immersion journalism, exploring themes of pain, brutality, and violence through various lenses, including martial arts, labor, sex work, athletics, BDSM, agriculture, pregnancy, chronic illness, and addiction. My curiosity about how these sites of brutality inform each other is the thread that connects these disparate worlds. To write about the body is political, and I seek to embed inquiries about gender, power, and privilege in my work. My hope for my writing is that it bridges gaps of confusion and isolation between my readers and parts of themselves, offering vocabulary for what is left unspoken.

Bio

Margo Steines is a native New Yorker, a journeyman ironworker, and serves as mom to a wildly spirited small person. Margo holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Arizona and lives and writes in Tucson. Her work was named Notable in Best American Essays 2021 and has appeared in The Sun, Brevity, Off Assignment, The New York Times (Modern Love), the anthology Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us, and elsewhere. She is the author of the memoir-in-essays Brutalities: A Love Story, forthcoming in October 2023 from W.W. Norton. Margo is faculty at the University of Arizona Writing Program, and she is represented by Matt McGowan at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency.

margosteines.com