Энн К. Пауэрс: Жизнь и творчество музыкального критика

American writer and music critic

Ann K. Powers (born February 4, 1964) is an American writer and popular music critic. She is a music critic for NPR and a contributor at the Los Angeles Times, where she was previously chief pop critic. She has also written for other publications, such as The New York Times, Blender and The Village Voice. Powers is the author of Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America, a memoir; Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black & White, Body and Soul in American Music, on eroticism in American pop music; and Piece by Piece, co authored with Tori Amos.

Powers was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. During elementary school, her first poem was published in the Our Lady of Fatima school newspaper. while she was still in high school, when she started writing for the Seattle music weekly magazine The Rocket. After college, in 1986, Powers started writing about popular music and pop culture as a columnist at the San Francisco Weekly. From 2001 until May 2005, Powers was senior curator at the Experience Music Project (EMP) in Seattle, which later became Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP). Powers and her husband Eric Weisbard have helped organize the annual EMP Pop Conference (now MoPOP Conference) since its inception in 2002. After a brief tenure as Blender magazine's senior critic, in March 2006, she accepted a position as chief pop critic at the Los Angeles Times, where she succeeded Robert Hilburn. Powers wrote regularly for Pop & Hiss, the Los Angeles Times' music blog, in addition to other features and news articles. She remained in this position until March 2011, when she departed for NPR, though she continued as a contributor for the Los Angeles Times afterward. Since 2011, Powers has been NPR Music's critic and correspondent. Powers has written for The Record, NPR's blog about finding, making, buying, sharing, and talking about music, since April 2011. In 2017, Powers spearheaded a multi platform project at NPR called Turning the Tables. The project sought to reconstitute the canon of American popular music by publishing a list of the 150 greatest albums by women and a related series of essays, audio features, and events. Powers is also the Nashville correspondent for World Cafe, regularly recording sessions with local and regional Southern musicians. Powers' work often critiques the perceptions of sex, racial, and social minorities in the music industry. She has written about topics such as religion, feminism, and film.

Powers has appeared in various TV shows and documentaries. She was in the film The Punk Singer as an interviewee discussing the influence of Kathleen Hanna on punk music. She also appeared in the documentaries The Gits and Undeniably Donnie in addition the Behind the Music Remastered episode on Heart.

Powers is married to Eric Weisbard, a music critic and professor of American studies at the University of Alabama. They moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 2009, later moving to East Nashville, Tennessee, in 2015. They have a daughter.