Margo Jefferson
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). Constructing a Nervous System received the Rathbones Folio Prize for Book of the Year in 2023. 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.
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Complex Issues: Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir
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News
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.
In her new book, Professor Margo Jefferson examines her life against a backdrop of American cultural influences.
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.
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.
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.
Soon After First Light is a series where we talk craft, process, and pandemic with Columbia's accomplished writing professors.
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, 2021
On 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.