My new book, A Jewish Appendix, was published in 2025 by Spuyten Duyvil. A Jewish Appendix is a memoir and travel adventure, a story of epigenetic inheritance, a search for home and belonging, and a reckoning with the power and paradox of Jewish identity. It’s an exploration of roots, and it’s for anyone who has ever explored their own. You can read more about A Jewish Appendix here.

Mark Oppenheimer, author of Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood, calls A Jewish Appendix “unique, thrilling, and epically weird, in the very best sense.” Sam Stephenson, author of Gene Smith’s Sink: A Wide-Angle View, calls my memoir “unusual, understated, and brilliant […] a journey into geographic roots of [the author]’s family tree overseas and the inner evidence of his own past,” and “the most variable and memorable use of the metaphor of the appendix since Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices.”

More about me:

My biography of rock music legend Chrissie Hynde was published by University of Texas Press in 2017. PopMatters called it “gloriously comprehensive […] Sobsey has enough musicianship to accurately analyze chord progressions and time signatures, embedding these in considerations of genre and other appropriate contexts. He has enough literary comprehension to trace themes and motifs across the lyrical compositions of multiple albums. [The book] is such a noble effort and so much a satisfying read that I’m happy to admit something I almost never do, which is that I couldn’t have written it better myself.”

You can find my online writing at The Paris Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, PopMatters, Spectrum Culture, and many other places around the web.

I’m the lead author of Bull City Summer (Daylight Books 2014), a collaborative documentary project and culminating book about minor-league baseball. Bull City Summer “captures not only the atmosphere at the games and in the stadium but also the complexities of being a minor-league baseball player,” The New Yorker wrote. According to another reviewer, “Adam Sobsey’s seemingly effortless dispatches are the anchor, the ballast and the mainsail of the project […] His erudite approach to baseball produces stories that typically contain deep historical knowledge, arcane tradecraft, and allusions to literature, philosophy and poetry.”

Bull City Summer evolved from my five years covering the Durham Bulls as the daily beat writer for the Independent Weekly and my position as a staff writer for Baseball Prospectus, a leading authority on the sport. I was a regular columnist for BP’s online daily publication and have been a multiyear contributor to its bestselling print edition Annual.

I was the chief book critic, sportswriter, and at-large contributor on theater and music, food and wine, for the Independent Weekly from 2006-2020. During that time, I won the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies’ grand prize for arts criticism and multiple awards from the North Carolina Press Association.

I am also a playwright. My plays have won the Best New American Play Award (Humboldt State University) and the Harvest Festival New Play Award (Live Oak Theatre, Austin, TX), as well as a 2005-06 North Carolina Arts Council Artist’s Fellowship. I was a finalist for North Carolina Piedmont Laureate in playwriting in 2011.

I hold an MFA in Writing from the University of Texas’ Michener Center for Writers, and a B.A. (Theatre Arts) from Brown University.

I can be reached via email: soba411 (at) gmail.