Margo Jefferson

Margo Jefferson is a professor at Columbia University School of Arts and writes for Newsweek and the New York Times. She received the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1995 and her 2017 memoir Negroland received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.

Constructing a Nervous System (published in Dutch as Het bouwen van een zenuwstelsel) is her much anticipated follow up to Negroland, In its pages, Jefferson splinters and then rebuilds herself by weaving her acclaimed criticism with the words of deceased relatives, descriptions of key moments in her life, and dramatized accounts from the people who accompanied her in her loneliness. Bing Crosby and Ike Turner are among the author’s alter egos, in a wildly innovative work of depth and stirring beauty which explores what a Black female body can be.