Say hello, Alex.

alex@alexandraleighyoung.com

I was born with a top 40 song stuck in my head. Janet Jackson’s Control and Queen’s Greatest Hits were the first cassette tapes I ever owned. My pop-music dreams came true in college when I got a gig in concert production and went on tour with Third Eye Blind, New Kids On The Block, Nick Lachey, and many more. After graduating from UC Berkeley in 2007, I moved to New York City where I ran an audio post-production house called Explosion Robinson. While there, I produced music and sound design for TV shows and video games like Ru Paul’s Drag Race, and Dance Central.

I was awarded an artist residency in South Korea in 2014, where I fell in love with a new kind of music: K-pop. After spending a year reporting on South Korea’s music industry, I returned to the US and produced my first podcast episode for Radiolab, called “K-poparazzi.” The episode was the inspiration for my debut YA novel, Idol Gossip (Walker US/Candlewick 2021).

In the fall of 2016, I was hired by The New York Times to produce and report their first narrative audio podcast, Change Agent. While there, I was part of the team that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service for the Times’s coverage of the Coronavirus pandemic.

I’m currently the deputy producer at The New York Times’s news podcast, The Daily

For inquiries about IDOL GOSSIP, please contact my literary agent Patricia [at] marsallyonliteraryagency.com