About Me

Emerson College Graduate Program Director in Journalism, NPR critic, Author

Tim Riley, @timrileyauthor

NPR critic, Emerson College Professor of Journalism and Author Tim Riley reviews music for HERE AND NOW and ON POINT. His reviews appear in the New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, and many other publications. He won the LA Press Club's award for Best Book Critic for his truthdig.com essays in 2016.

Since 2009, he has taught digital journalism at Emerson College in Boston. He teaches Cultural and Music Criticism, and serves as Graduate Program Director for the Master's Degree.

His sixth book, WHAT GOES ON: THE BEATLES, THEIR MUSIC IN THEIR TIME (Oxford), now finds use in college classrooms as the first textbook devoted to the band's recordings. His biography of John Ono Lennon (Hyperion, 2011), won praise from Rolling Stone, and NPR, New York Times ("...a critical tour-de-force"). Riley gave a keynote address at Monmouth College's WHITE ALBUM symposium on the 50th anniversary of that album, and lectured at Brown University as its Critic-In-Residence in 2008. As a popular presenter, he's given hundreds of lively multi-media lectures on "Censorship in the Arts," and "Rock History."

In the Spring of 2022, he launched millennium pop: music, love & squalor, a multimedia anthology.

“Criticism that clicks…”

For clips see http://timrileyauthor.com.