A lifelong addict of popular culture, Lloyd Sachs is the author of T Bone Burnett: A Life in Pursuit (University of Texas Press, 2016), a finalist for Best Historical Research in Recorded Folk, Roots, or World Music, 2017 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Awards. He also wrote American Country: Bluegrass, Honky Tonk and Crossover Sounds (Twenty-First Century Books, 2012) and pieces of his appear in The City Was Yellow: Chicago Jazz and Improvised Music, 1980-2010, Mike Reed, ed. (2019, Reed and Jazz Institute of Chicago) and The Best of No Depression, Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock, eds. (2005, University of Texas Press).
A native of Queens, New York, now based in Chicago, Sachs reviews fiction for Kirkus Reviews, was a crime fiction columnist for the Chicago Tribune and has reviewed fiction and nonfiction for the Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, Newsday, Chicago magazine, the Dallas Morning News and other publications. He has profiled literary greats including Norman Mailer, V.S. Naipaul, Joseph Heller, Salman Rushdie, Elmore Leonard and Richard Russo.
Sachs’ writings on jazz and popular music have appeared in the Sun-Times, where he was an award-winning editorial writer, Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Down Beat, JazzTimes and USA Today. He was a senior editor and columnist at No Depression, a contributing editor at Chicago magazine and “Hot Type” columnist for the Chicago Reader. He writes the program notes for the Chicago Jazz Festival.
On the radio, he was the voice of “Sachs and the Cinema” on WXRT and co-host of the jazz program “Writers Bloc” on WNUR with Kevin Whitehead and John Corbett. Sachs is an adjunct professor at Columbia College Chicago and also has taught at Loyola University, the University of Illinois at Chicago and Triton College.
LLOYD SACHS 