Now a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts, Jefferson won a Pulitzer for criticism during her years as a book and theater critic at the New York Times and associate editor at Newsweek. The author of On Michael Jackson, Jefferson in her second book turns her sharp eye on her own upbringing. Raised in upper-class Chicago in the 1960s, the daughter of the head of pediatrics at Provident hospital, Jefferson feels her true home was an uncharted region she calls Negroland. There, she wasn’t quite part of either the black or white communities; if she experienced the freedom of class, she always felt the limitations imposed by race. Her passionate new memoir, Negroland, complicates the already fraught picture of the civil rights era, describing the painful and frustrating circumstances of an overlooked sector of American society.

Jefferson will be joined in conversation by Lisa Page. Page directs the creative writing program at the George Washington University. Her work has appeared in Origins, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Washington Post Book World, Playboy, the Crisis, the Chicago Tribune, and other publications. She is a resident faculty member of the Yale Writers Conference.

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