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Meet THe Team
Kick off your Southern Festival of Books weekend with The Porch on Friday, where you’ll have a unique opportunity to learn from celebrated authors as they pass through Nashville before the festival officially begins! Stick around for the rest of the day to take more writing classes with Justin Taylor, Darnell Arnoult, and Shawntelle Madison.
Music writing has long been an unheralded source of imaginative, risky approaches within the lineage of creative nonfiction. In recent years, as genres have blurred, the realms of music criticism, biography and memoir have blurred and more writers grounded in the love of music have received wide attention. This class explores how music fandom and music-making can open doors to all kinds of inquiries. We will briefly consider works by writers like Hanif Abduraqqib, Kristin Hersh, Deborah Parédez, Geoff Dyer and Danyel Smith and explore, through on-the-spot writing, how a song or musical experience can form the ground of rich storytelling.
Ann Powers is NPR Music’s critic and correspondent. Throughout a long career 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 Music, she is the author of four books, most recently Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell (2024). 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 and she has also written for television, radio and podcasts. In 2017 she co-founded the award-winning NPR series Turning the Tables, which shed light on marginalized, underestimated and forgotten voices in popular music. She lives with her family in Nashville.
Ann is new to The Porch. Welcome!
