This Woman's Work: Essays on Music

Sinéad Gleeson’s essay collection Constellations: Reflections from Life won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2019 Irish Book Awards and Dalkey Literary Award for Emerging Writer. It was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She is the editor of The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers, The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland and The Art of Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories. Sinéad has engaged in multi-disciplinary collaborations with artists and musicians, including commissions from City Gallery Wellington, the Wellcome Collection, BBC and Frieze. In 2021, she collaborated with composer Stephen Shannon and artists Aideen Barry on By Slight Ligaments (Limerick City Gallery) and Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon on The Map / We Are The Map (Rua Red). She is co-editor with Kim Gordon of This Woman’s Work: Essays on Music (White Rabbit Books/Hachette, 2022) and is currently working on a novel.

Leslie Jamison was born in Washington DC and grew up in Los Angeles. Since then, she has lived in Iowa, Nicaragua, New Haven, and (currently) Brooklyn, and has worked as a baker, an office temp, an innkeeper, a tutor, and a medical actor. Every one of these was a world that still exist in her. Currently, she teaches in the nonfiction concentration at the Columbia University MFA program. 

Her most recent essay collection, Make It Scream, Make It Burn, was released in September 2019. Her other works include a novel, The Gin Closet, a collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, and a critical memoir, The Recovering. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer.

Jenn Pelly is a freelance writer and author of The Raincoats. She is a contributing editor at Pitchfork, where she worked on staff for six years. Her writing appears in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and she contributes weekly to the New Yorker's "Goings On" section. She is from the south shore of Long Island and lives in Brooklyn.

Since forming in Dublin in late 2016, Pillow Queens have shared stages with the likes of IDLES, Soak and Pussy Riot, developing a community of loyal and passionate fans. In the winter of 2019, the band traveled to rural Co. Donegal to record their debut album, In Waiting, with award-winning producer Tommy McLaughlin (Soak/Hanna Peel). Released through the band’s own label in September 2020, In Waiting was met with critical acclaim, including a 5-star Irish Times review, which called the album “an emotional masterpiece.”

In Waiting was nominated for Ireland’s prestigious Choice Music Prize as Album of the Year. It earned Album of the Day and A list play on BBC 6 Music, and drew praise and support from the likes of NPR’s All Songs Considered and KEXP’s Song of the Day. 

In 2021, the band was invited to make their US Late Night television debut on CBS’s The Late Late Show, and later signed with Sub Pop Publishing. In May, the band returned to their Dublin city practice space to begin writing their next record, and have recently found a new home for it, signing a worldwide deal with Toronto’s Royal Mountain Records. They plan to spend the rest of the year touring to sold-out shows in Ireland and the UK.

Photo credit: Faolán Carey