Cultural critic Margo Jefferson came to Iowa City in April 2011 to read at Prairie Lights and lead a seminar in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Wiring Program. She sat down for this On the Fly interview during her visit.
In the interview, Jefferson talks about her interest in new forms of creative nonfiction, the ways in which music can help her recharge, and her efforts to eliminate weak qualifiers from her criticism.
Jefferson, who has been a staff writer for Newsweek and the New York Times, won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1995. She is the author of 2006’s On Michael Jackson, which contemplates Jackson’s life and the media frenzy surrounding his 2005 trial for child molestation. She has garnered a Rockefeller Foundation/Theater Communications Group grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches in the Columbia University MFA Writing Program.
