Morgan Jerkins ’14: Giving voice to powerless figures in history
Morgan Jerkins ’14 is The New York Times bestselling-author of “This Will Be My Undoing,” “Wandering In Strange Lands,” and the forthcoming “Caul Baby,” due in April 2021. She graduated from Princeton with an AB in Comparative Literature, specializing in late 19th century Russian literature and post-World War II Japanese literature, and earned an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Currently, she is the senior editor of ZORA, a digital magazine from Medium, and regularly teaches in Columbia University’s MFA program in nonfiction. She was the Guest Picador Professor at Leipzig University and was recently named to the Forbes 30 under 30 Class of 2021. She’s based in Harlem, New York.
We asked Jerkins five questions about her work and what she’s thinking forward.
What keeps you up at night?
I want to figure out how to reconcile the archival silence of the lives and histories of enslaved African Americans with my creative imagination, as someone who is a descendant of those people.
Who or what inspired you to become a writer?
It was actually a work that made me realize how incredible literature can be and that was “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov.
What excites you most about your work?
Oh, the documents that I can get my hands on, as well as the scholars and historians who I interview. I'm at a point in my career where history really excites me.
How do you hope that your work will help create a better future?
Whew, that's a lofty one. I hope that my work will help create a better future by exposing audiences to different textures of African American lives, such as my own Black girlhood and womanhood predominantly in New Jersey and Harlem that I wrote about in my first book. My second book is a larger American history set against the backdrop of the Great Migration, and my upcoming novel centers solely on Harlem with characters whose lineage stems from Louisiana.
What does “forward thinking” mean to you?
Forward thinking to me is thinking of how my decisions today will impact myself, my community and strangers alike tomorrow.
Photo by Sire Leo Lamar Becker
