Margo Jefferson with Doreen St. Félix: Constructing a Nervous System

This event, previously scheduled to take place at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (SNFL), is only taking place virtually.

The award-winning critic and memoirist discusses her wildly innovative new work of depth and stirring beauty.

Margo Jefferson has been called “one of our most nuanced thinkers on the intersections of race, class, and feminism.” Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir “as electric as the title suggests,” is the groundbreaking follow-up to her beloved Negroland. Jefferson brings a cast of family members, writers, artists, athletes, and starts to life—people who trouble and thrill her—in a performance of the elements that comprise and occupy her mind. Jefferson shatters herself into pieces and recombines them into a new and vital apparatus on the page, fusing the criticism that she is known for, fragments of the family members she grieves for, and signal moments from her life, as well as the words of those who have peopled her past and accompanied her in her solitude, dramatized here like never before.

Jefferson speaks with New Yorker staff writer Doreen St. Félix about interrogating her own self, the act of writing memoir, and probing the fissures at the center of American cultural life.

This program will be streamed live on the NYPL event page.

ACCESSIBILITY NOTES
A live transcript will be provided. ASL interpretation is available upon request. Please submit your request at least two weeks in advance by emailing accessibility@nypl.org. A pre-filled Gmail template is available by clicking here. Any media will be accompanied by alt text to reference before the program or by audio description.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson was for years a book and arts critic for Newsweek and The New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, New York magazine, The Nation, and Guernica. She is also the author of On Michael Jackson and is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.

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Margo Jefferson © Claire Holt