Margo Jefferson | What Is a Public Intellectual Today?

The Public Humanities Initiative, and its flagship "What Is A Public Intellectual Today?" speaker series, invite you to a public interview with acclaimed author and professor Margo Jefferson.

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson has been a book, theater and cultural critic for The New York Times and Newsweek. She has written for The Washington Post, New York Magazine, VOGUE, O, The Believer, Guernica, Bookforum, and The Nation. Her essays have been anthologized in The Best American Essays; The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death; The Best African American Essays; The Jazz Cadence of American Culture; The Mrs. Dalloway Reader, and elsewhere. She has written three books: On Michael Jackson (2005), Negroland (2015), and Constructing a Nervous System (2022). She received the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, the 2022 Windham Campbell Prize for Nonfiction, and the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize for Nonfiction. She lives in New York and teaches writing at Columbia University.

In this candid public interview, Jefferson will be interviewed by Professor Michele Elam, the William Robertson Coe Professor in the Humanities in Stanford's Department of English. Professors Jefferson and Elam will discuss elements of literary craft, how to build a career as a public intellectual, and the path to publishing.