Alex Ross

Alex Ross, a native of Washington, DC, has been the music critic of 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. His second book is the essay collection Listen to This. He is now at work on Wagnerism: Art in the Shadow of Music, a study of Richard Wagner’s vast and variegated influence on the arts and literature from his lifetime to the present. Ross has received an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Belmont Prize in Germany, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He is married to the filmmaker Jonathan Lisecki.

Profile photograph by David Michalek.