eMusic Editor-in-Chief J. Edward Keyes has been writing about music since 1997 for publications including RollingStone.com, Newsday, the Village Voice and Entertainment Weekly. His piece "Where's The Party? 13 Hours with the Next Franz Ferdinand" was selected for inclusion in Da Capo's Best Music Writing 2006. For two years he was a member of a one-man industrial band, about which the less said the better. The J. stands for Joe.

eMusic Director of Merchandising Sean Fennessey has been writing professionally since 2002. Before that, unprofessionally. He's a former Music Editor of VIBE and has written about music, film, television and culture for SPIN, The Village Voice, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, GQ.com and New York Magazine's Vulture. If asked nicely, he will share his annotated compendium of Jay-Z songs.

eMusic Audiobooks Editor Maris Kreizman has worked as a book editor at Counterpoint Press and at Free Press/Simon & Schuster, where she specialized in literary fiction, music, pop culture, narrative nonfiction, and memoir. She runs a tumblr blog called Slaughterhouse 90210, which combines her love of literature and TV.

eMusic International Editor Jayson Greene writes about music for Pitchfork, the Village Voice and other publications. From 2004-2007, he was associate editor for SYMPHONY Magazine, where he wrote about American orchestras. He is a violinist in the indie-folk outfit The Instruments and has been on NPR to discuss Three 6 Mafia's appropriation of Carmina Burana, perhaps his finest moment. He lives in Brooklyn.

eMusic Production Editor Laura Leebove is a Brooklyn-based music journalist whose writing has appeared in various publications, including Billboard, Spinner.com, Venus Zine, Critical Mob, Under the Radar and Heeb. Thanks to her Michigan roots, she hates the word "soda," and can point out her hometown on her hand.

Classical

Justin Davidson is the classical music and architecture critic at New York magazine. A native of Rome, Davidson worked as a stringer at the Rome bureau of the Associated Press before coming to the US to attend Harvard as a music major. While in college, he worked as a stringer for the Associated Press Boston bureau, studied classical guitar and began a career as a composer.

After spending a year on a music fellowship in Paris, Davidson moved to New York City to pursue a doctoral degree in music composition at Columbia University, where he also was instructor and later adjunct professor of music. His compositions, which have been performed in the US, Italy, China and Eastern Europe, have won him grants and awards from the American Academy/Institute of Arts and Letters, the Mellon Foundation, Meet the Composer, Columbia University and the Fondation des Etats-unis in Paris.

In 1996 he joined the Newsday staff as a classical music critic and, six years later, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. In 2003, he added a second beat to his brief, becoming the paper's first architecture critic.

International

Richard Gehr has been writing about international music -- and many other things -- for more than two decades. After moving to Los Angeles from Portland, OR, via Baltimore, he was the Los Angeles Reader's arts editor during the early '80s. He relocated to New York to become an editor at Spin, and wrote the magazine's "World Beat" column for a few years. He has also written for the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Musician, Blender, Tracks, AARP: The Magazine and countless other publications both living and archived. In a separate but equal universe, he co-authored The Phish Book with the fab Burlington quartet. He began the current millennium as Sonicnet.com's world music editor and continues to freelance from polyethnic Brooklyn, New York, where he resides in domestic tranquility with his wife and two daughters.

Hip-Hop/R&B

Hua Hsu writes about culture and politics for Slate, the Village Voice, the Wire, the Boston Globe and various other magazines and weeklies. He grew up in California's Bay Area but currently resides in Brooklyn, New York, where he is completing his PhD in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University.

Blues

John Morthland, who lives in Austin, is currently a writer at large for Texas Monthly and a regular contributor to various other music and general-interest publications, both print and online. He has been an associate editor of Rolling Stone and editor of Creem, and has contributed to virtually every music magazine of the past three decades; he has also written liner notes for several hundred albums and has contributed to numerous non-music daily, weekly, monthly and online publications. He is the author of The Best of Country Music (Doubleday, 1984) and the editor of Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader (Random House, 2003). He is also the music consultant for the River Music Experience, a museum of Mississippi River music in Davenport, Iowa.

Rock/Pop

Lenny Kaye is a guitarist, writer and record producer. He is a founding member of Patti Smith's band, and has worked with such varied artists as Suzanne Vega, Allen Ginsberg, Waylon Jennings, Soul Asylum, Kristin Hersh, Eugene Chadbourne, and Jim Carroll. His anthology of sixties' garage bands, Nuggets, is a landmark of the genre. In 2004, Villard/Random House published You Call It Madness: The Sensuous Song of the Croon, his impressionistic study of the romantic singers of the early 1930's.

Electronic

San Francisco critic Philip Sherburne has been heavily involved in the electronic-music world for the past seven years, writing for publications including the Village Voice, Slate, XLR8R, URB, Wax Poetics, Grooves, Nylon, RES, Neumu.net and many others -- including The Wire, where his "Critical Beats" column offers a monthly roundup of experimental dance music. Philip has also written on sound art and avant-garde practice for Frieze and Parkett, curated the companion CD for Leonardo Music Journal's 2003 issue, and given talks at SFMOMA, PS1, Tate Modern and the MUTEK festival. A book chapter on classical minimalism and minimal techno is forthcoming in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner's Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Continuum Press). As a DJ, Philip holds regular nights in San Francisco, and has performed in New York, Austin, Portland, Seattle, Montreal and Barcelona.

Jazz

Kevin Whitehead is jazz critic for National Public Radio's daily show Fresh Air. His writings on music have appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Reader, the Village Voice, CD Review, Down Beat, the Absolute Sound and many other publications. In the '90s Whitehead spent four years in Amsterdam, where he wrote New Dutch Swing (Billboard Books), a study of improvised music in that city, and edited the oral history Bimhuis 25: Stories of Twenty-Five Years at the Bimhuis. Other books to which he's contributed include the Cartoon Music Book (2002), Jazz: The First Century (2000), the Gramophone Jazz Good CD Guide (1995, 1997) and Mixtery: a Festschrift for Anthony Braxton (1995). Whitehead is an editorial advisor and contributor to the 2001 edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. He is also a member of the improvising band Starship Beer, heard on the CD Nut Music 1976-88 (Atavistic).

Alternative/Punk

Douglas Wolk is a freelance writer who covers music, comic books, and new technology for the Village Voice, the Washington Post, Slate, Rolling Stone, Publishers Weekly, Slate and a lot of other places; his book Live at the Apollo was published by Continuum Books in August 2004. He has a weblog at http://www.lacunae.com, complete with the occasional MP3, plays bass in a couple of new wave bands and has run the tiny label Dark Beloved Cloud since 1992. He lives in Portland, OR, with the photographer Lisa Gidley, the sassy American shorthair Edie Blues Explosion Gidley, a whole lot of old 45s, and several billion dust mites.