Annalyn Swan is a former senior arts editor of Newsweek. She began her career as a writer at Time, then joined Newsweek in 1980 as music critic and subsequently became the magazine’s arts editor. From 1986 to 1990 she was editor-in-chief of Savvy magazine, an upscale women’s business publication, and, from 1990 to 2005, divided her time between writing and serving as a consulting editor for major media companies, including Time Inc. and Gruner and Jahr. She taught biographical and memoir writing at Princeton University in 2013, and currently teaches in the Biography and Memoir M.A. program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, as well as at Breadloaf Middlebury School of English.
A graduate of Princeton University and a Marshall Scholar, she earned her master’s degree at King’s College, Cambridge University. She is a former trustee of Princeton University and the former head of the Advisory Council of Princeton’s English Department and of the Princeton Alumni Weekly board. She is also a trustee emeritus of The Daily Princetonian (she was the paper’s first woman editor-in-chief) and a member of the board of the Works and Process series at the Guggenheim Museum. She has written for numerous publications, including The New Republic, the New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair, and contributed to catalogs and collections of essays, among them The Lives of the Piano. She is the winner of an Ascap-Deems Taylor award and a Front Page Award for her music criticism.
