Ann Powers
Ann Powers is NPR Music's critic and correspondent. She writes for NPR's music news blog, The Record, and she can be heard on NPR's newsmagazines and music programs.
One of the nation's most notable music critics, Powers has been writing for The Record, NPR's blog about finding, making, buying, sharing and talking about music, since April 2011.
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.
Her writing extends beyond blogs, magazines and newspapers. 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.
After earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University, Powers went on to receive a Master of Arts degree in English from the University of California.
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NPR Music's Ann Powers and Rodney Carmichael discuss albums they're looking forward to, as well as the artists they're begging to come back. -
Bikini Kill's instant anthem for the '90s riot grrrl movement found new purpose at rock camps, where young girls learn to express themselves through music. Hanna breaks it down with NPR's Ann Powers. -
Aretha Franklin died of pancreatic cancer Thursday. Her hits, from the 1960s to the 1980s, helped define the era. NPR's Noel King talks to NPR music critic Ann Powers about the singer's legacy.
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Her music has been sung at marches and political rallies, heard in churches and on chain restaurant jukeboxes. Everything popular music can be is there in the songs of Aretha Franklin. -
The results are in for our reader poll, and your picks for the greatest albums made by women deeply modify and sometimes openly challenge our original Turning the Tables list. -
A listening party to discuss Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse's legacies, their differences and the music they shared with the world before leaving us at the too-young age of 27. -
On her new album, Reputation, Taylor Swift continues to chronicle the links between romance, revenge and her own personal sense of justice, but also confronts how she may be trapped by her own image. -
Why make a list of the greatest albums by women? To start a new conversation, where musicians who have too long been marginalized are now at the center. -
In a year of stunning loss, music fans found new opportunities to create virtual communities, continuing conversations their departed icons started. -
The revered songwriter, who died November 7 at the age of 82, compelled us to dwell on the relationship between the profane and the profound.
