Discipline: Literature

Ellen Willis

Discipline: Literature
MacDowell Fellowships: 1978, 1980, 1982
Ellen Jane Willis (1941 – 2006) was an American left-wing political essayist, journalist, activist, feminist, and pop music critic. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award (Criticism). She attended Barnard College and did graduate study at University of California, Berkeley, where she studied comparative literature for a semester but left graduate school shortly afterwards. In the late 1960s and 1970s, she was the first pop music critic for The New Yorker, and later wrote for, among others, the Village Voice, The Nation, Rolling Stone, Slate, and Salon, as well as Dissent, where she was also on the editorial board. She was the author of several books of collected essays. At the time of her death from cancer, she was a professor in the journalism department of New York University and the head of its Center for Cultural Reporting and Criticism.

Studios

Sorosis

Ellen Willis worked in the Sorosis studio.

Sorosis Studio was funded by the New York Carol Club of Sorosis. The small, masonry studio was designed by F. Winsor, Jr., the architect who also designed Savidge Library (1926) and Mixter Studio (1927). At the time of construction, the large porch on the southeast façade offered a spectacular mountain view that has since been obscured…

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