Interviews July 22, 2015

In 2003, Jessica Hopper, who had been writing about music since she was in ninth grade in the early 1990s, published her first longform essay, “Emo: Where the Girls Aren’t,” in Punk Planet. This landmark piece confronted the emo scene’s inherent sexism, and established Hopper as one of the nation’s foremost feminist music critics. Since then, she has written hundreds of pieces—on her blog and for an array of magazines, tackling everything from intimate musician profiles to deeply reported features on rock in advertising. Now, she’s collected some of her greatest hits in the book The First Collection of Criticism