journalist music critic writer
Ross is a 1986 graduate of Saint Albans School in Washington, District of Columbia, and a 1990 graduate of Harvard University, where he studied under composer Peter Lieberson and was a DJ on the classical and underground rock departments of the college radio station, WHRB.
He has been on the staff of The New Yorker magazine since 1996. He also authored the books The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007) and Listen to This (2011). He earned a Harvard Bachelor of Arts in English summa cum laude for a thesis on James Joyce.
From 1992 to 1996 Ross was a music critic at The New York Times.
He also wrote for The New Republic, Slate, the London Review of Books, Lingua Franca, Fanfare and Feed. He first contributed to The New Yorker in 1993 and became a staff writer in 1996.
His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, a cultural history of music since 1900, was released in the United States. in 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and in the United Kingdom in 2008. The book received widespread critical praise in the United States., garnering a National Book Critics Circle Award, a spot on The New York Times list of the ten best books of 2007, and a finalist citation for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction.
The book was also shortlisted for the 2008 Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction.
His second book, Listen to This, was released in the United States. in September 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and was published in the United Kingdom in November 2010. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, three American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers-Deems Taylor Awards for music writing, and a Holtzbrinck fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. Alex Ross married director Jonathan Lisecki in Canada in 2006.
(Reprint)
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Married Jonathan Lisecki, 2005.