Margo Jefferson is Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, and a 2022 recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction. She has published three books: Constructing a Nervous System: a memoir (2022); Negroland: a Memoir (2015;) and On Michael Jackson (2005). Negroland won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, The International Bridge Prize, The Heartland Prize and was short-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize. She has been a staff arts critic for The New York Times and Newsweek, and has published in New York Magazine, The Nation, The Washington Post, The Believer, Guernica, Bookforum, O and VOGUE. Her essays have been anthologized in: The Best American Essays, 2015; The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death; What My Mother Gave Me; The Best African-American Essays, 2014; The Mrs. Dalloway Reader; Black Cool, The Sammy Davis, Jr. Reader and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture.
Upcoming Event
Sep 28 Wed
Complex Issues: Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir
The Katharina Otto-Bernstein Screening RoomLenfest Center for the Arts
615 W 129 St
New York, NY 10027
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Event time is displayed in your time zone.
News
WritingA Cultural Critic Publishes Her Second Memoir
In her new book, Professor Margo Jefferson examines her life against a backdrop of American cultural influences.
Writing
Professors Margo Jefferson and Leslie Jamison Contribute to 'This Woman's Work: Essays on Music'
White Rabbit Books recently published This Woman's Work, an essay collection that includes contributions from Professor and School of Journalism alumna Margo Jefferson and Professor Leslie Jamison.?
Writing
Professor Margo Jefferson Awarded 2022 Windham-Campbell Prize
?
Professor and School of Journalism alumna?Margo Jefferson?'71 was recently awarded a 2022 Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize (Windham-Campbell Prize), one of the literature field's most esteemed awards.
Writing
'Constructing a Nervous System' by Professor Margo Jefferson '71 Out Next Month
Penguin Random House recently published the memoir Constructing a Nervous System by Professor and School of Journalism alumna?Margo Jefferson?'71. The book is now?available for pre-order.
Writing
Soon After First Light: Margo Jefferson
Soon After First Light is a series where we talk craft, process, and pandemic with Columbia's accomplished writing professors.
Writing
Alumni and Faculty Books on Schomburg Center's Black Liberation Reading List
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research library of The New York Public Library in Harlem, compiled a Black Liberation Reading List "in response to the uprisings across the globe demanding justice for Black lives."
Margo Jefferson: ‘If I Can’t Find a Way to Do That… Why Am I Writing a Memoir?’
January 27, 2021On this episode of?Thresholds, Margo Jefferson, author of?Negroland?and?On Michael Jackson,?talks about learning to write with more freedom, with more of one’s own voice and selfhood directly in play, in view, and at risk.
?
? Michael Lionstar
Professor of Professional Practice, Writing, Undergraduate Creative Writing
Journalism Alumna 1971