Evelyn McDonnell

McDonnell was born in Glendale, California and grew up in Beloit, Wisconsin. She was "weaned on the Jackson 5 and the women's movement." Her first concert experiences were with her family at the Milwaukee Summerfest, where she saw Dave Brubeck, Journey and Squeeze. As a teenager, she listened to Iggy Pop and Patti Smith, and would drive to Chicago for shows by artists including New Order and the Dead Kennedys. She attended Brown University and graduated with a BA in American History. In 2010, she earned a master's degree in Specialized Journalism, the Arts,from the University of Southern California, Annenberg School.

Newspapers, weeklies, magazines

In college, McDonnell began writing professionally, first for the Providence NewPaper and then for the Providence Journal. She was a contributing editor for the NewPaper from 1985 through 1989, and then the associate editor of the San Francisco Weekly. In 1996 she was named music editor for the Village Voice. That same year, she founded a fanzine, Resister, "a scholarly arts and literary journal for the masses, a fanzine for the mainstream, a magazine that's raw and sticky, not slick and glassy, a nuts and bolts guide to thought and expression." She was a pop culture writer and music critic for The Miami Herald from 2001-2007.

In the early 90s McDonnell freelanced for publications including Rolling Stone, Spin, Ms., The New York Times, and Billboard.She wrote frequently about bands and musicians associated with the underground feminist punk movement, Riot Grrrl, and was a founding member of Strong Women in Music (SWIM), an activist group supporting women on all music-industry levels. McDonnell wrote: "It was the early '90s, when direct activism, identity politics, hip-hop, and grunge were driving forces of the dawn of the Clinton era. We were a new breed of woman whom pundits, including some in our own ranks, struggled to name: postfeminists, womanists, Riot Grrrls, pro-sex feminists, do-me feminists (a name obviously thought up by a men's magazine), third-wave feminists, lipstick lesbians, bitches with attitudes."

Books

McDonnell and Ann Powers co-edited Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop, and Rap, published in 1995. An anthology of women's writing on music from the 1960s to the time of the book's publication, it compiled "exciting evidence of women writers' inroads made over the past three decades into the still male-dominated field of popular music criticism."

McDonnell worked with Jonathan Larsen on Rent by Jonathan Larsen, an account of the creation of the rock opera Rent. She conducted interviews and wrote much of the text for the book, which was published in 1997. In a review, Entertainment Weekly wrote "It’s not at all surprising that a book on this show would be so sharp. What is surprising is that the book often seems more compelling and moving than the musical itself."In 1998, she co-edited Stars Don't Stand Still in the Sky : Music and Myth. Her book about Bjork, Army of She: Icelandic, Iconoclastic, Irrepressible Bjork, was published in 2001.

In 2009 McDonnell's "account of a life lived on the cultural and maternal cutting edge," Mamarama: A Memoir of Sex, Kids, & Rock 'n' Roll was published. It was followed by Queens of Noise: The Real Story of the Runaways in 2013.

Academics

In 2009 McDonnell was awarded an Annenberg Fellowship to study Specialized Journalism, the Arts, at the University of Southern California. She received her master's in 2010. She is associate professor of journalism and new media at Loyola Marymount University.

McDonnell is the stepmother of her husband's two adult daughters, Karlie and Kenda. She and her husband, Bud, live with their son Cole in San Pedro, California.