Margo Jefferson

Margo Jefferson is an American cultural critic, memoirist, and journalist born in 1947 in Chicago, Illinois. She studied at the University of Edinburgh and Columbia University. She was a staff writer and cultural critic for The New York Times for twenty-five years and won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1995. Negroland (2015) is her first book, a memoir about growing up in Chicago's Black professional class in the 1950s and 1960s — a world of exceptional privilege and crushing racial restriction. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. Constructing a Nervous System (2022, Pantheon) is her second memoir, a fragmented, formally experimental work that assembles her influences — jazz, theatre, literature, dance, culture — into a meditation on Black American intellectual and artistic life, moving between Josephine Baker, Michael Jackson, Marianne Moore, and her own history as a cultural critic. It won the overall Rathbones Folio Prize in 2023.