Professor Margo Jefferson's Memoir Named a Finalist for the Carnegie Medal

Constructing a Nervous System (Pantheon Books, 2022), the latest memoir by Professor Margo Jefferson, is among the finalists for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

Presented by the American Library Association, the Carnegie Medal is awarded annually to the best adult fiction and nonfiction book published in the United States. The awards, established in 2012, “serve as a guide to help adults select quality reading material.” This year, there are three finalists for fiction and three for nonfiction, including Jefferson’s memoir.

The selection committee chair for 2023, Stephen Sposato, will announce the two medal winners at the Reference and User Services Association’s Book and Media Awards (BMAs) live streaming event on Sunday, Jan. 29, 2022. The two Carnegie Medal winners will each receive a cash prize of $5,000, and all of the finalists will be honored during a celebratory event in the summer of 2023 during ALA’s annual conference.

Constructing a Nervous System was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, as well as several other outlets including The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and TIME Magazine. According to the ALA's shortlist announcement, “Blending the multicolored threads of Black cultural life with memories of her past in this impressionistic memoir, Jefferson reflects on the Black icons who shaped her worldview, from jazz great Bud Powell to legendary entertainer and Resistance hero Josephine Baker. Jefferson is a critic’s critic, turning her keenly honed analysis on herself, her family, and her class, while relentlessly interrogating the broader underlying context of white racism.”

Jefferson’s memoir received a plethora of critical praise. The New York Times review says, “This is a book for deep submergence, not quick flipping. This is appointment reading. Clear the schedule and commit . . . Jefferson writes about craving “license” as a young woman, dispensation to play “with styles and personae deemed beyond my range.” She has—along with other recent innovators in the form . . . grabbed hold of that permission slip and torn it to shreds.”

This past October, Jefferson appeared at the Lenfest Center for the Arts to discuss Constructing a Nervous System with Associate Professor of Professional Practice Deborah Paredes, where she described her goals with this project. Invoking the memoir’s title, she said, ​​“I wanted the objects and figures, the records that I was falling in love with. . . to have an internal life that was intense and very specific. That is constructing an aesthetic system, a nervous system.” 

Constructing a Nervous System is available for purchase here. 

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.