Margo Jefferson is the author of On Michael Jackson, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic. She has been a staff writer for the New York Times and Newsweek, and has published in The Believer, Bookforum, New York Magazine, The Nation, the Washington Post, Gigantic, Grand Street, and elsewhere. Her essays have been anthologized in The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, The Best African-American Essays, The Mrs. Dalloway Reader, The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, Black Cool, and What My Mother Gave Me. She teaches in the writing program at Columbia University.