Margot Mifflin

Margot Mifflin is an author praised for writing "delicious social history (Dwight Garner, The New York Times). She wrote the first history of women's tattoo culture, Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo, and The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman, a finalist for a Caroline Bancroft History Award. Her 2020 book Looking for Miss America, the first cultural history of the Miss America pageant, is a Cosmopolitan Best Nonfiction Book of 2020, a New York Post Best Book of 2020, a Publishers Weekly Best Summer Book, a National Book Review 5 Hot Books Pick, and a PureWow 12 Best Nonfiction Books of 2020. It was awarded the 2021 Pop Culture Association's Emily Toth Best Book in Woman's Studies award. “A spellbinding…first-rate analysis of the United States’s most distinctive beauty contest.” —The Los Angeles Review of Books“Mifflin’s lively book reads as an obituary…She’s cleareyed about the pageant’s many hypocrisies and failures…But Mifflin, too, is invested in the pageant’s sense of specialness.” —The New York Times “Mifflin is as alive to the pageant’s historical grotesqueries as she is to the weirdo details of its founding.” —The New Yorker“This incisive and entertaining history deserves the spotlight.” —Publishers Weekly “Nothing short of fascinating.” —Cosmopolitan