Morgan Jerkins
“I want people to realize that no matter if I’m writing fiction or nonfiction, everything is a conversation with something else that I’ve read; everything is a call and response.”
Morgan Jerkins
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“Morgan Jerkins’ fantastic, expansive novel of mothers and daughters and Harlem, Caul Baby, is a meditation on the limits of inheritance and legacy. It’s also a love letter to a rapidly changing neighborhood.”
“The true strength of this book has a profound impact: in conveying the life-giving and life-sustaining power of Black women’s bodies, and the blood relationships between them. . . . The women Jerkins creates do not need men or any other outsiders to rescue them; they rescue themselves.”
“Wandering in Strange Lands is in many ways a quintessentially American story. . . Jerkins makes plain that denying space for Black identities in history is itself a legacy as American as its original sins of racism and enslavement. By exploring the truth of that past with such integrity, this memoir enriches our future.”
“[A] forthright and informative account. . . . Jerkins’s careful research and revelatory conversations with historians, activists, and genealogists result in a disturbing yet ultimately empowering chronicle of the African-American experience. Readers will be moved by this brave and inquisitive book.”
“In Morgan Jerkins’s remarkable debut essay collection, This Will Be My Undoing, she is a deft cartographer of black girlhood and womanhood. From one essay to the next, Jerkins weaves the personal with the public and political in compelling, challenging ways. Her prodigious intellect and curiosity are on full display throughout this outstanding collection. The last line of the book reads, ‘You should’ve known I was coming,’ and indeed, in this, too, Jerkins is prescient. With this collection, she shows us that she is unforgettably here, a writer to be reckoned with.”
“Without turning linguistic or lyrical cartwheels, Jerkins lucidly articulates social dynamics that have dictated the realities of American black women for centuries…. Indeed, [This Will Be My Undoing] is a book I wish everyone in this country would read.”
Morgan Jerkins is an author, editor, journalist, filmmaker, and professor. A writer of both fiction and nonfiction, her most recent book is the novel Caul Baby (Harper, 2021), an Amazon Best Book of 2021. Her other books are Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots (Harper, 2020), one of Time’s must read books of 2020, and This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America (Harper, 2018), a New York Times Bestseller.
As a journalist, she’s written about the internet, intersecting social issues and popular media through celebrity profiles and interviews, reportage, commentary, and personal essays. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and The Guardian, among many others. She’s won two National Magazine Awards and was a Forbes 30 Under 30 Leader in Media.
Jerkins is also a filmmaker. Her debut short film, Black Madonna, which she wrote and co-directed, was selected at the Big Apple Film Festival, Pan African Film & Arts Festival, and NewFilmmakers Los Angeles.
In an interview with Shondaland, Jerkins was asked about the best writing advice she’s received: “I often say my own advice, which I tell people, especially women of color and women authors, is “don’t ask for permission.” I’ve realized that for those who are from marginalized backgrounds, the hard part for them is just getting this started because they’re waiting for someone to tell them that what they have gone through matters. And not only that it matters but that someone will care about it.”
She teaches Creative Writing at Princeton University where she also holds a Bachelor’s in Comparative Literature. She has an MFA from Bennington College, and has taught at Columbia University,, Pacific University, The New School, and Leipzig University, where she was the Guest Picador Professor. Based in New York City, she was born and raised in New Jersey.
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Caul Baby
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Wandering in Strange Lands
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This Will Be My Undoing
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