Pop Conference 2016

Jasen Emmons is the Director of Curatorial Affairs at EMP Museum, overseeing the Curatorial, Collections, Exhibits, and Education departments and championing Pop Conference every year. In his spare time, he occasionally gets to curate pop culture exhibits like Fantasy: Worlds of Myth and Magic and Taking Aim: Unforgettable Rock ‘n’ Roll Photographs Selected by Graham Nash. He started working at EMP in 1999, which makes this year his... Read More →

Charlie Bertsch is currently on the faculty of the Honors College at the University of Arizona. He is also co-editor-in-chief of Souciant, an eclectic magazine of culture and politics based in Europe. Back in the early 1990s, he helped found Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, one of the longest-running online publications in the world, and has also written regularly for ZEEK, Tikkun, Phoenix New Times, and Punk... Read More →

Dwandalyn R. Reece is Curator of Music and Performing Arts at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and is curating the music exhibition, Musical Crossroads, which will open in September 2016. Reece has worked on such projects as the 2011 Folklife Festival program, Rhythm & Blues: Tell it Like It Is, and is a member of the SI pan-institutional group, Smithsonian Music. Before joining... Read More →

David Ritz’s most recent book is Willie Nelson’s memoir, It’s a Long Story. In June, 2016, Little Brown will publish his collaboration with Tavis Smiley, Before You Judge Me, a study of the last sixteen weeks in the life of Michael Jackson. Ritz has collaborated on memoirs with everyone from Ray Charles and Don Rickles to Etta James and Cornel West. He’s presently working on books with Jessi Colter and Lenny Kravitz... Read More →