American writer and critic, after getting a Bachelor of Arts at Brandeis University in Massachusetts she graduated in journalism at Columbia. From 1973 to 1978 she worked as an editor at Newsweek, then she taught journalism and mass communication at the New York University until 1991. Now she teaches at Columbia. She started writing for the New York Times in 1993 as a literary critic, and for her work she was presented with the Pulitzer Prize for journalism. She wrote for Vogue, New York magazine, The Nation and Guernica. In 2006 she published the nonfiction book On Michael Jackson. In 2015 she wrote the memoir Negroland, National Book Critics Circle Award in the same year.