Margo Jefferson

Margo Lillian Jefferson is an American writer and academic. Jefferson received her B.A. from Brandeis University, where she graduated cum laude and her M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She became an associate editor at Newsweek in 1973 and stayed at the magazine until 1978. She then served as an assistant professor at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at New York University from 1979 to 1983 and from 1989 to 1991. 

Since then, she has taught at the Columbia University School of the Arts, where she is now a professor of professional practice in writing. Jefferson also taught at The New School's Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. She joined The New York Times in 1993, initially as a book reviewer, then went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1995. She also served as the newspaper's theater critic in 2004. In addition to the Times, she has written for Vogue, New York Magazine, The Nation, and Guernica.

Jefferson has a longstanding interest in jazz and appeared in Ken Burns's 2001 documentary series about the history of music. Jefferson's 2006 book, On Michael Jackson, was described by Publishers Weekly as a "slim, smart volume of cultural analysis." According to Lucy Scholes in The Independent: "The excellent On Michael Jackson is not a straightforward biography, nor is it an attempt to claim either his innocence or his guilt when it comes to the child abuse scandals that, although he was acquitted, haunt his afterlife. 

A 'deciphering' is probably the most accurate description of the book, the shrewd playfulness of Jefferson’s prose the perfect vehicle for analysis that’s as smart as it is readable." Jefferson's autobiographical book, Negroland, was published to acclaim in 2015. Dwight Garner described it in The New York Times as a "powerful and complicated memoir," and by Margaret Busby in The Sunday Times as "utterly compelling," while Anita Sethi wrote in The Observer: "Jefferson fascinatingly explores how her personal experience intersected with politics, from the civil rights movement to feminism, as well as history before her birth." 

Tracy K. Smith wrote in The New York Times: "The visible narrative apparatus of 'Negroland' highlights its author’s extreme vulnerability in the face of her material. It also makes apparent the all-too-often invisible fallout of our nation’s ongoing obsession with race and class: Namely, that living a life as an exemplar of black excellence — and living with the survivor’s guilt that often accompanies such excellence — can have a psychic effect nearly as deadening and dehumanizing as that of racial injustice itself." In 2016 Negroland was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the Autobiography category.

Jefferson contributes to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby. In 2022, Jefferson was the recipient of a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in the category of non-fiction. Her book Constructing a Nervous System was a finalist for ALA 2023 Carnegie Medal and the 2023 National Book Critics Circle award in criticism. The book was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio prize.