I’m a multi-genre writer: the author of two books, a widely published journalist and essayist, and a playwright whose work has been seen from New York to California.

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.”

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 author for Baseball Prospectus, the 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 have written about sports and culture for The Paris Review, Grantland (RIP), Town & Country, and many other outlets. 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. In 2022 I joined PopMatters as a staff writer. (Disclaimer: the PopMatters review of my Chrissie Hynde biography, cited above, was published five years prior to my becoming a staff writer.)

I am currently at work on publishing my new book, A Jew by the Roots, a memoir of traveling across Southern and Eastern Europe and the Caucasus in search of my heritage.

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 also 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 found on Twitter @sobsey and reached via email: soba411 at gmail.