The National Book Critics Circle Awards are given out in six categories: autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. This year, three of the six winners are women with current affiliations in the academic world.
Charlotte Gordon won the award in biography category for her book Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley (Random House, 2015). Dr. Gordon is an associate professor of English at Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts. A native of St. Louis, Dr. Gordon is a graduate of Harvard University, where she majored in English and American literature. She holds a master of fine arts degree in creative writing and a Ph.D. in literature from Boston University.
Margo Jefferson is a professor of writing in the School of the Arts at Columbia University and a professor at the Eugene Lang College of The New School for Liberal Arts in New York. She won in the autobiography category for Negroland (Pantheon, 2015). Professor Jefferson won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism while writing for The New York Times. She is a graduate of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and holds a master’s degree from Columbia University.
Maggie Nelson won in the criticism category for her book The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015). She was the only woman nominated in the criticism category. Dr. Nelson teaches writing at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Before joining the faculty of CalArts in 2005, she taught literature and writing at Wesleyan University, the Pratt Institute of Art, and the New School. Dr. Nelson holds a Ph.D. in literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.