Margo Jefferson
Margo Jefferson won the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 1995, and the 2015 National Book Critics Circle award in autobiography for her memoir, Negroland, about growing up in an upper-middle class black family in Chicago. During her years at the New York Times, she wrote brilliantly about literature, music, dance, and the way racial politics seeps into culture: what the late Stanley Crouch called the “all-American skin game.” In our conversation, Margo spoke about her childhood in Chicago, her early experiences in radical theater at Brandeis University, her relationship to the feminist and Black Power movements, her emergence as a writer, and her battles with melancholia.