FORA.tv Speaker - Alex Ross

Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. From 1992 to 1996 he wrote for the New York Times. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, was published in 2007 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and became a national bestseller. Selected as one of the New York Times's ten best books of year, The Rest Is Noise won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and the Royal Philharmonic Society's Creative Communication Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Samuel Johnson Prize. Ross has received an honorary doctorate from the Manhattan School of Music, a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center, fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin and the Banff Centre, and three ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards. He has served as a McGraw Professor in Writing at Princeton University, and in 2008 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. His next book, Listen to This, will appear in October 2010. A native of Washington, DC, Ross now lives in Manhattan. He is married to the actor and filmmaker Jonathan Lisecki.