Kristin Hersh
Musician

Rat Girl
Penguin, September 2010

Kristin Hersh is a songwriter, guitarist, and the founder of the seminal art punk rock band Throwing Muses. Over the course of her two-decade career as a musician, she has released over twenty critically acclaimed albums, including nine solo albums and four with her current band, 50FootWave.

In 2007, Kristin helped found the nonprofit Coalition of Artists and Stake Holders (http://cashmusic.org), recording and releasing music without the aid of a record company. She is entirely listener-funded and makes her music available, free of charge and free to be shared, via Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licenses (http://creativecommons.org).

Kristin's memoir, “Rat Girl” (to be published under the title "Paradoxical Undressing" in the UK) is inspired by her teenage diary entries from 1985 and ’86. The book chronicles her descent into mental illness and the subsequent unraveling of the young woman’s personality, following her through an arduous yet inspiring recovery. We come to know the idiosyncratic Hersh as unconventional yet sympathetic as we track the rise of Throwing Muses in the early days of indie rock and then Hersh’s subsequent unplanned pregnancy.

She lives in Providence, RI and New Orleans with her husband and their four sons.

Visit: http://kristinhersh.com