Ann Powers is the chief pop critic for the Los Angeles Times. She has been writing about music for more than twenty years, since she was a teen-age New Wave fan in Seattle, Washington, She joined the staff in May 2006, after four years as a Senior Curator at Seattle's Experience Music Project, an interactive museum devoted to celebrating the spirit of rock and roll throughout popular culture. In her time there, she co-curated exhibits on subjects including the songwriting process and the history of disco, and helped organize the annual Pop Conference, an international gathering of writers, scholars and artists discussing popular music. Powers worked as a pop critic for the New York Times from 1997 until 2001. Before that, she was a senior editor at the Village Voice. She also spent a year as a Senior Critic for Blender magazine. She has written for most major music publications, and contributed to others including Slate, Salon, L.A. Weekly, and S.F. Weekly, where she was a founding editor. With Evelyn McDonnell, Powers co-edited "Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop, and Rap" (1995), a groundbreaking collection of work by women music writers. "Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America" (1999) blended memoir and cultural analysis in a personal history of alternative culture in the 1980s and 1990s. The best-selling "Tori Amos Piece By Piece: A Portrait of the Artist" (2005), co-written with the artist, explored the creative process of this noted singer-songwriter in extensive interviews and commentary. Powers has also been extensively anthologized, most recently in Da Capo Press's "Best Music Writing" series, in both 2004 and 2005. In 2007, she will publish a short book on the album "The Dreaming," by Kate Bush, for the Continuum Press 33 1/3 series. Powers lives in Mt. Washington with her husband, Eric Weisbard, and their daughter, Rebecca Brooklyn Weisbard.