Jessica Hopper

A feminist whose voice and conviction has helped lead music criticism’s shift away from the boys-club mentality that’s blighted the medium for decades, Jessica Hopper compiled some of her most memorable pieces from major publications and small zines alike in her 2015 anthology The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female. Her new book is even more personal. A pocket-sized memoir narrated in short, poetic prose, Night Moves chronicles long nights spent traversing Chicago in the mid-’00s on bike, DJing parties, catching shows and hobnobbing with friends and musicians (one colorful chapter is set at a Hold Steady video shoot). It’s an account of a time that already feels half forgotten—the pre-iPhone era of Friendster and Netflix DVDs by mail—as well as a portrait of a city in transition. “I love Chicago as is, burnished perfect from years of disrepair,” she writes in one dispatch from 2005. Hopper appears at Boswell for a conversation with Radio Milwaukee DJ Justin Barney.