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.

The Windham-Campbell Prize recognizes eight English-language writers each year for their achievements in Drama, Fiction, Nonfiction, Fiction, and Poetry. Writers, critics, booksellers, and editors are invited to nominate individuals who represent the breadth and excellence of contemporary literature. The recipients of the prize are then selected by a panel of jurors. With the mission to help writers focus on their work without financial constraints, the Windham-Campbell Prize grants each recipient $165,000.

Jefferson was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize in Nonfiction. Of her work, the organization stated, "Margo Jefferson’s incisive commentary on American life opens up counterintuitive dimensions, and invites us to rethink our assumptions, unknotting complex ethical subjects."

In an interview with The Guardian, Jefferson stated that the prize supports "the work you plan and hope to do…Maybe your plan is clear. Maybe you’re still in a dream space with half-formed thoughts and images. The prize says: trust your life as a writer.”

Jefferson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic. She has been a staff writer for The New York Times and Newsweek; her reviews and essays have appeared in New York Magazine, Grand Street, Vogue, Harper’s, and many other publications. Her book, On Michael Jackson, was published in 2005. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation / Theater Communications Group grant. She has also written and performed two theater pieces at The Cherry Lane Theatre and The Culture Project. Margo's 2015 memoir Negroland received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, The Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, The Bridge Prize for Nonfiction, and was short-listed for The Baillie Gifford Prize. The New York Times also listed it as one of the 50 best memoirs of the last 50 years. Jefferson's latest book, Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir, will be out on April 12, 2022.