After getting a Bachelor of Arts at Brandeis University, Jefferson graduated magna cum laude at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. From 1973 to 1978 she worked as associated editor at Newsweek, then she became an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at the New York University, where she stayed until 1991. After that, she went back at Columbia as a teacher. She started contributing to the New York Times as a book reviewer and she went on winning the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. She also wrote for Vogue, New York Magazine, The Nation and Guernica. In 2006 she published the nonfiction book On Michael Jackson. In 2015, her autobiography Negroland, about her childhood among the black upper-class in 1950s and 1960s America, came out, acclaimed unanimously by critics and readers.