Alan Light

Alan Light has appeared as a music and culture expert on numerous television and radio programs, and was the director of programming for Live from the Artists Den, a concert series on PBS. As former editor-in-chief of Spin and Vibe magazines as well as the founder and editor of Tracks, Light has written for countless publications. A former senior writer at Rolling Stone, he won two ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards for his work. Light wrote What Happened, Miss Simone?: A Biography (Crown 2016); the oral history of The Beastie Boys, The Skills to Pay the Bills (Three Rivers 2005); and edited The Vibe History of Hip Hop (Crown 1999) and the New York Times bestseller Tupac Shakur (Crown 1997). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and Rolling Stone and hosts the SiriusXM music talk channel VOLUME. Light is based in New York City.