“I was taught you don't tell your secrets to strangers - certainly not secrets that expose error, weakness, failure. My generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements received little notice or credit from white America, we were not to discuss our faults, lapses, or uncertainties in public.”

American writer and academic

Margo Jefferson is an American writer, academic, and journalist known for her criticism. She was writing for The New York Times from 1993 and received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1995. Her work has also appeared in Vogue, New York Magazine, The Nation, and Guernica. She is known for cultural criticism and essays that move across literature, art, and public life.