Margo Jefferson to Deliver Keynote Lecture on Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess”

By Logan Martell

Fort Worth Opera has announced that Margo Jefferson, distinguished author, academic, and cultural critic, will be delivering a keynote lecture on George and Ira Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” on Saturday, April 27, 2019. The lecture will be part of the opening weekend for the 2019 Fort Worth Opera Festival.

“I grew up with Porgy and Bess,” said Jefferson. “I’ve been watching and listening to some form of it since 1959 when the movie came out. I know it as a musical; I know it as an opera. I’ve charted its course as a much-debated racial and cultural document. I‘m very excited about the coming Fort Worth production. Porgy and Bess demands that we, its American audience, live with its contradictions and live up to its complexities. When we do that, it rewards us with its musical glories.”

In 1995, Margo Jefferson won the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for her work at The New York Times. Among the publications where Jefferson’s essays and reviews have appeared are The Guardian, Harper’s, The Scholar, and New York Magazine. She has served as an arts criticism contributing editor with Vogue, and an associate editor for Newsweek. Currently, Jefferson is a professor of writing at Columbia University.

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