Jefferson received her
B.A. degree from
Brandeis University, where she graduated
cum laude, and her
M.S. from the
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She became an associate editor at
Newsweek in 1973 and stayed at the magazine until 1978. She then served as an assistant professor at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at
New York University from 1979 to 1983 and from 1989 to 1991. Since then, Jefferson has taught at the
Columbia University School of the Arts, where she is now professor of professional practice in writing. Jefferson also taught at
The New School's
Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. She joined
The New York Times in 1993, initially as a book reviewer, then went on to win the
Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1995. She also served as the newspaper's theater critic in 2004. In addition to the
Times, she has written for
Vogue,
New York Magazine,
The Nation, and
Guernica. Jefferson has a longstanding interest in jazz, and appeared in
Ken Burns'
2001 television documentary series about the history of the music.
Writing Jefferson's 2006 book,
On Michael Jackson, was described by
Publishers Weekly as a "slim, smart volume of cultural analysis". According to Lucy Scholes in
The Independent: "The excellent
On Michael Jackson is not a straightforward biography, nor is it an attempt to claim either his innocence or his guilt when it comes to the child abuse scandals that, although he was acquitted, haunt his afterlife. A 'deciphering' is probably the most accurate description of the book, the shrewd playfulness of Jefferson's prose the perfect vehicle for analysis that's as smart as it is readable." Jefferson's autobiographical book,
Negroland: A Memoir, was published in 2015. It was described by
Dwight Garner in
The New York Times as a "powerful and complicated memoir", and by
Margaret Busby in
The Sunday Times as "utterly compelling", while
Anita Sethi wrote in
The Observer: "Jefferson fascinatingly explores how her personal experience intersected with politics, from the civil rights movement to feminism, as well as history before her birth."
Tracy K. Smith wrote in
The New York Times: "The visible narrative apparatus of 'Negroland' highlights its author's extreme vulnerability in the face of her material. It also makes apparent the all-too-often invisible fallout of our nation's ongoing obsession with race and class: Namely, that living a life as an exemplar of black excellence — and living with the survivor's guilt that often accompanies such excellence — can have a psychic effect nearly as deadening and dehumanizing as that of racial injustice itself." In 2016,
Negroland was shortlisted for the
Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and won the
National Book Critics Circle Award in the Autobiography category. Jefferson is a contributor to the 2019 anthology
New Daughters of Africa, edited by
Margaret Busby. In 2022, Jefferson was the recipient of a
Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in the category of non-fiction. Her book
Constructing a Nervous System was a finalist for ALA 2023 Carnegie Medal and the 2023 National Book Critics Circle award in criticism. The book won both the overall and non-fiction categories of the
Rathbones Folio Prize. ==Awards==