Winner of the 2018 Rubin Institute Prize in Music Criticism, Jennifer Gersten is a freelance journalist, violinist, and music critic from Queens, New York. (For her violinist / performer bio, please see the “Music” tab.) Her reporting, essays, and music criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, and many other publications. In collaboration with the Norwegian experimental label SOFA, she hosts SOFA STORIES, a podcast on SOFA’s pathbreaking musicians. She has also been an on-air essayist for the PBS NewsHour and an editor at Guernica. Jennifer is currently based in Norway as a recipient of both a Fulbright research grant and an American Scandinavian Foundation fellowship.
Jennifer graduated from Yale with a degree in English and creative writing, and she is pursuing a DMA in violin performance at Stony Brook University, from which she also received her master’s. She was a finalist in the 2015 Norman Mailer Four-Year College Writing Awards for an essay about her mother, an amateur ballroom dancer, that served as the genesis for her senior thesis project on the Asian American ballroom community of Flushing, NY.
Contact Jennifer at jengersten@gmail.com and follow her on Twitter @jenwgersten. She hopes to hear from you. The Urban Outfitters newsletters in her inbox are getting lonely.
Jennifer Gersten 