The Best Music Writing editorial board is a group of writing peers put together each year to select the first round of Best Music Writing nominations. The selection will be known as "The Year's Best Music Writing." The board serves to reach out to writers and collect, read, nominate, and defend works for consideration for the coming year's anthology. Each board member will have equal rights to consider work and vote on materials for inclusion. A new board will be put together each year, and past board members may stay on for three years consecutively. After serving for three years, a board member must step down for at least one year.
Biographies of the 2012 Best Music Writing Editorial Board
Adam Curley is a writer and editor from Melbourne, Australia. His column, “The Breakdown: Pop Culture Therapy,” is published by the national music press publisher Street Press Australia in titles along the east coast of Australia. Adam is the former editor of Inpress, Street Press Australia’s Melbourne title, and currently acts as a Contributing Editor for the publisher. He is a regular contributor to the music and opinion pages of The Big Issue as well as the culture pages of the Sunday edition of Melbourne daily The Age and Australia’s first iPad-only title, Three. Adam’s first works of short fiction will be published in Australian journals in 2012.
Jewly Hight ponders popular music for The Nashville Scene, Nashville Public Radio, American Songwriter, Relix, and several other outlets. In 2011 she published her first book, Right By Her Roots: Americana Women and Their Songs, and is currently in the very early stages of book two. She lives and
writes in East Nashville, Ten..
Miles Marshall Lewis
blogs about Paris, hip hop, pop culture and the arts at Furthermucker.com. He
is a recognized pop culture critic, essayist, literary editor, fiction writer,
and music journalist. MML is author of the essay collection Scars of
the Soul Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don’t Have Bruises,
concerning coming of age in the Bronx under the aegis of hip hop culture at its
genesis. He was also the series editor and founder of Bronx Biannual (2006-07), an urbane urban literary journal of
fiction and essays, and author of There’s a Riot Goin’ On, a book on the making of the seminal 1971 Sly and
the Family Stone album of the same name.
During
the past 19 years, MML has written for The Nation, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, The
Believer, Spin, L.A. Weekly, The Believer, Wax
Poetics, Essence, Dazed and Confused, The Fader, One More Robot, and
many other publications. He served as the music editor of Vibe, deputy editor of XXL, literary editor of Russell Simmons’s Oneworld, deputy editor of BET.com, and a contributing writer
for The Source during the 1990s.
His interview with the late Pulitzer-winning playwright August Wilson is anthologized in The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers alongside Joan Didion, Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers, and his fiction has been published in Bronx Noir, Wanderlust, Brown Sugar 3: When Opposites Attract, Oneworld, Rap Pages, Bronx Biannual, Uptown, and Open. Lewis's nonfiction has likewise been anthologized in editor Rebecca Walker's Black Cool: A Thousand Streams of Blackness, Music + Travel Worldwide: Touring the Globe Through Sounds and Scenes, and Hip-Hop: A Cultural Odyssey. After seven years in Paris, MML currently lives in Harlem.
Bongani Madondo is a Senior Editor/Writer for Rolling Stone South Africa. His quirky, prickly, and, by turns, meditative New Journalism has appeared in Best Life, Reader's Digest, Marie Claire, and The Sunday Times Lifestyle, where he was a long-time senior staffer. His urban dystopian fantasy short story “Jordania: 2020,” anchored the 2008 Big Issue Summer Fiction issue. In 2009, Madondo published the critically acclaimed Hot Type: Icons, Artists & God-Figurines (Picador Africa), which was the Sub-Saharan Africa recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts grant. He has been a fellow at the Advanced Visual Arts Journalism program at American University in Washington, DC.
Michaelangelo Matos lives in Brooklyn and writes regularly for Capital New York and the Village Voice. He also appears in Rolling Stone, Spin, The Daily, eMusic, and NPR. He's currently at work on a history of American rave in the '90s.
Anupa Mistry lives in Toronto and writes on music, pop culture, and diversity for the Toronto Standard, NOW Magazine, Exclaim!, CBC Hip-Hop and AOL/Spinner. Her work has also been published in Toronto Life, FASHION, POUND, The Grid and ELLE Canada. One time she went on TV, taking the couch on MuchMusic's Rap City to talk about controversial internet rapper Lil B. Anupa is also a juror for Canada's Polaris Music Prize.
Ann Powers is NPR Music's critic and correspondent. Powers served as chief pop music critic at the Los Angeles Times from 2006 until she joined NPR. Prior to the Los Angeles Times, she was senior critic at Blender and senior curator at Experience Music Project. From 1997 to 2001 Powers was a pop critic at The New York Times and before that worked as a senior editor at the Village Voice. Powers began her career working as an editor and columnist at San Francisco Weekly. Powers co-wrote Tori Amos: Piece By Piece, with Amos, which was published in 2005. In 1999, Power's book Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America was published. She was the editor, with Evelyn McDonnell, of the 1995 book Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Rap, and Pop and the editor of Best Music Writing 2010.
Mark Richardson is the Editor-in-Chief of Pitchfork and the author of Zaireeka, a book in the 33 1/3 series about the Flaming Lips album. His column, Resonant Frequency, has appeared regularly on Pitchfork since 2001. Mark taught a course on music writing at Columbia College Chicago and his work has appeared in publications including the Village Voice, LA Weekly, Kill Screen, and Metro Times Detroit.
Alex Ross has been a music critic at The New Yorker since 1996. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ross has received an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and honorary doctorates from the New England Conservatory and the Manhattan School of Music. In 2008, he was named a MacArthur Fellow, and in 2012 he will receive the Belmont Prize in Germany. His second book, Listen to This, appeared in 2010. He is also the co-editor, with Daphne Carr, of the 2011 edition of Best Music Writing. He is now working on a book entitled Wagnerism. A native of Washington DC, he now lives in Manhattan and is married to the filmmaker Jonathan Lisecki.
Victoria Segal started writing for Melody Maker, before heading to the NME. Since then, she has contributed to Mojo, Q, The Sunday Times, The Times, New Statesman and The Guardian, mostly writing about music but also covering film, television, books and theatre.
Victoria Segal started writing for Melody Maker, before heading to the NME. Since then, she has contributed to Mojo, Q, The Sunday Times, The Times, New Statesman and The Guardian, mostly writing about music but also covering film, television, books and theatre.