TWO-PART INVENTIONS: A COLLABORATIVE METHODOLOGY
Margo Jefferson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and a 2022 recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction. She has published three books: Constructing a Nervous System (2022); Negroland (2015); and On Michael Jackson (2005). Negroland won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, The International Bridge Prize, The Heartland Prize, and was short-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize. She has been a staff arts critic for The New York Times and Newsweek, and has published in New York Magazine, The Nation, The Washington Post, The Believer, Guernica, Bookforum, O, and Vogue. Her essays have been anthologized in The Best American Essays; The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death; What My Mother Gave Me; The Best African-American Essays; The Mrs. Dalloway Reader; Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness; The Sammy Davis, Jr. Reader; and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture.
Elizabeth Kendall is a dance and culture critic/historian and a professor of Literary Studies/Writing Track at the New School’s Lang College and NSSR. She is the author of Balanchine and the Lost Muse: Revolution and the Making of a Choreographer (OUP, 2013); Where She Danced (Knopf & California); The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1930’s (Knopf & Cooper Square Press); as well as two memoirs, American Daughter (Random House) and Autobiography of a Wardrobe (Pantheon and Anchor/Doubleday); and numerous articles about dance, books, fashion and movies. She has received fellowships from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Cullman Center, Fond Likhacheva, and the Leon Levy Center for Biography. She has two forthcoming books: Balanchine Finds His America: A Tale of Love Lost & Ballet Reborn (OUP, 2025), an experimental narrative of choreographer George Balanchine’s early years in the U.S. (1933-1946); and Two-Part Inventions: Scenes from a Friendship (Pantheon, 2026), a memoir co-authored with Margo Jefferson.
