Ann Powers: Telling the Storytellers’ Stories

Powers has made a career of telling the stories of storytellers. It’s no exaggeration to say that her work has broadened the scope of music criticism—in terms of whose stories are told and how they get told. Powers will discuss her approach to craft, ethics, and genre, with plenty of opportunity for lively conversation.

Ann Powers is NPR Music's critic and correspondent. Throughout a long career in music writing she has worked at the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice and many other publications. A former curator at Seattle's Museum of Popular Culture, she is the author of Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell (2024); Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music (2017), which was selected as one of the best books of 2017 by the Wall Street Journal, No Depression, NPR, and Buzzfeed; the New York Times best-selling Tori Amos Piece by Piece, co-authored with the artist (2005), and Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America (1999), a New York TimesNotable Book of the Year. With Evelyn McDonnell, she edited the classic anthology Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Rap, and Pop (1995). Her essays have been widely anthologized. In 2017 she co-founded NPR’s award-winning Turning the Tables, an ongoing project to recenter the popular music canon to be more inclusive of marginalized, underestimated and forgotten voices. She lives in Nashville.

This event will be held in the 9th Floor Skylight Room. Please present ID in the lobby.