Monday, November 17, 2025 • 7 pm
Choral Room, Music Building
or join us on Zoom

Writers at Queens, the college reading series sponsored by the MFA Program, is bringing you not one but two incredible music critics on November 17. Deborah Paredez and Ann Powers are coming to talk about music and culture with a feminist slant–women who rock should scare the misogynists out there, which should be all the more reason to attend!

And if you can’t make it to campus, you can always join us on Zoom:

BIOS:

Deborah Paredez is a poet, performance scholar, and cultural critic. She is the author of the critical memoir American Diva (Norton 2024), the scholarly book Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory, and the poetry collections This Side of Skin (Wings Press 2002) and Year of the Dog (BOA Editions 2020), a New York Times “New and Notable Poetry Book.” She is associate professor and chair of creative writing at Columbia University and the co-founder of CantoMundo, a national organization dedicated to Latinx poets and poetry.

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. 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). 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.