margo jefferson

Professor of Professional Practice

Margo Jefferson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic.  She was on the staff of The New York Times from 1993 to 2005 where she wrote about books and theater and eventually became a Critic-at-large. She has also written for The Washington Post, Salon, The Nation, The Village Voice, VOGUE, O, the Oprah Magazine, Newsweek and Harper’s. Her work has been anthologized in The Mrs. Dalloway Reader, Best African American Essays: 2010, Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture She has received Guggenheim and Rockefeller /Theater Communications Group fellowships, and her essay, Katherine Anne Porter: Self Made won a GE/Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines Award.  Her book, On Michael Jackson, was published by Pantheon in 2005 and Vintage in 2006. Her theater piece, Sixty Minutes in Negroland, was produced at The Cherry Lane Theater and The Culture Project in 2002.  She teaches in the Writing Program at Columbia University.