Morgan Jerkins

Jerkins' first book This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America was published on January 30, 2018 by Perennial/HarperCollins.[13] The book is a nonfiction collection of essays including topics such as experiencing bullying as a child, feminism, dating, and attending Princeton as a Black student.[5] The cover was inspired by one of the covers for Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.[5]

The book received mainly positive critical reception.[14] Ilana Masad wrote in a review for the Los Angeles Times, "there is a brutal honesty Jerkins brings to the experiences of black girls and women that is vital for us to understand as we strive toward equality, toward believing women’s voices and experiences, and toward repairing the broken systems that have long defined our country."[3] Roxane Gay stated in Elle, "This Will Be My Undoing is not a perfect book—there are places where I wanted her to push her conclusions further—but the prose resonates with the promise of a talented writer coming into her own."[15] In a less positive review, Khanya Khandlo Mtshali wrote in Los Angeles Times Book Review, "Morgan Jerkins is an industrious writer whose success is undoubtedly a product of her work ethic and determination. But This Will Be My Undoing falls into the tradition of art that upholds an easy and showy moralism."[16] The book received a starred review from Publisher's Weekly[1][17] and was a New York Times bestseller.[18]

Her second book, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots was published in August 2020 under HarperCollins.[2] It is a memoir of Jerkins' journey through several Southern states to answer long-held questions about her family's history.[2][18] Kirkus Reviews described it as a "revelatory exploration of the meaning of blackness."[2]