Karen Tongson is the author of Why Karen Carpenter Matters (one of Pitchfork’s best music books of 2019), Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011), and the forthcoming Normporn: TV’s Spectacles of Normalcy (2023). In 2019, her body of writing to date was awarded Lambda Literary’s Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction. She is Chair of gender & sexuality studies, and Professor of gender & sexuality studies, English, and American studies & ethnicity at USC. She is also co-editor of the award-winning book series, Postmillennial Pop with Henry Jenkins at NYU Press, editor-at-large at air/light, and on several editorial boards for scholarly journals. Her writing and cultural commentary have appeared in Slate, NPR, The Criterion Collection, The Los Angeles Review of Books, PBS NewsHour, The Los Angeles Times, KCRW’s Good Food, BuzzFeed Reader, The Washington Post, The AV Club, Entertainment Weekly and Süddeutsche Zeitung, among other venues. She is the founder and director of the Mellon-funded Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race & Public Culture at USC Dornsife, and cohost of the podcast Waiting to X-Hale with Wynter Mitchell-Rohrbaugh, which co-curated the LA Philharmonic’s 2022 “GenX Festival.” She is also President of the Association for Studies of the Arts of the Present. In 2023, Tongson will hold a Hunt-Simes Chair in Sexuality Studies at the University of Sydney.