Jim DeRogatis

Born the year the Beatles arrived in America, Jim DeRogatis began voicing his opinions about popular music shortly thereafter. He is a professor of practice at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and the co-host of Sound Opinions, the weekly pop-music talk show heard on 110 Public Radio stations and via podcast. DeRogatis spent 15 years as the pop-music critic at The Chicago Sun-Times and has written 10 books about music, including Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly and Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs.

Francesca Royster

Francesca T. Royster is Professor of English at DePaul University and received her PhD in English from University of California, Berkeley.  Royster has  written creative and scholarly work on Shakespeare, Black country music performers and fans, Prince, Beyoncé, Tracy Chapman, queer utopias and chosen family, among other topics.  Her books include Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era  (University of Michigan Press, 2013), Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions (University of Texas Press, 2022), and Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance (Abrams/ Overlook Press, 2023). Among her awards,  Black Country Music won the 2023 Ralph Gleason Music Books First Prize from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the 2023 ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research​,  the 2023 Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award, from The American Musicological Society and the 2023 Woody Guthrie Award for most Outstanding Book on Popular Music by the International Association of Popular Music Studies- US.